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Monday, October 21, 2013

The Future of Workers' Compensation

Congress has pushed the deadline for dealing with social issues and expenditures until after Election Day. That still leaves many issues including the future of Social Security and the delivery of medical benefits unaddressed. Those issues are closely intertwined with the patchwork of national programs called workers' compensation. Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org

The deal President Barack Obama, Republican and Democratic lawmakers reached to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling includes a bipartisan panel charged with producing a long-term budget agreement.
Led by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., the 29-member panel has a Dec. 13 deadline to reach consensus, a timeframe that seems optimistic considering the bitter partisan showdown over the health law that resulted in a 16-day government shutdown of the government and risked federal default.
In remarks Thursday, the president called for a new era of bipartisan cooperation on Capitol Hill. “To all my friends in Congress, understand that how business is done in this town has to change,” the president said. He noted that the nation’s fiscal challenges are the “long-term obligations that we have around things like Medicare and Social Security.  We want to make sure those are there for future generations. “
In a joint statement, Murray and Ryan pledged to work together to find a way around the automatic spending cuts known as “sequestration” now governing federal spending. “We hope we can reduce the deficit in a smarter way. We hope to restore stability to the budget process and end the lurching from crisis to crisis,” they said.
Medicare currently accounts for 16 percent of the federal budget, a share that will grow as more baby...
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