Today, health care reform legislation’s new insurance rules go into effect, and insurers are scrambling to make sure that they get ahead of the changes. The New York Times has the story:
“Insurers are cutting administrative staff to lower overhead costs, investing in big technology upgrades and training employees to field the expected influx of customer inquiries.
“Despite the talk among some Republicans of repealing all or part of the law, insurers say they cannot afford to put off the changes. Many said they were fundamentally altering their business models to cope.
“‘It is really the Manhattan Project because of the scale and the scope,’ said Karen Ignagni, chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group.
“Under the new law, insurers that offer child-only policies must start covering all children, even the seriously ill, beginning on Thursday. Insurers must also begin offering free preventive services, and for the first time, their premiums must start passing muster with federal and state regulators by the end of the year.”
Mountains of paperwork are creating opportunities for fraud and forgeries that compromise the foreclosure process. The Washington Post writes:
“The nation's overburdened foreclosure system is riddled with faked documents, forged signatures and lenders who take shortcuts reviewing borrower's files, according to court documents and interviews with attorneys, housing advocates and company officials.
“The problems, which are so widespread that some judges approving the foreclosures ignore them, are coming to light after Ally Financial, the country's fourth-biggest mortgage lender, halted home evictions in 23 states this week.
“During the housing boom, millions of homeowners got easy access to mortgages while providing virtually no proof of their income or background. Now, as millions of Americans are being pushed out of the homes they can no longer afford, the foreclosure process is producing far more paperwork than anyone can read and making it vulnerable to fraud.”
Birthright citizenship is a well-established and settled legal issue, according to Raul A. Reyes, a New York City attorney who wrote in response to Charlotte Allen’s piece calling for an end to the practice in the Los Angeles Times:
“As an attorney and supporter of immigrant rights, I tried to read with an open mind Charlotte Allen's Sept. 20 Times Op-Ed article, ‘A birthright that shouldn't be.’ Allen argued against the 14th Amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship, warned of the costs associated with U.S.-born children of undocumented workers and castigated the Obama administration for failing to secure our borders.
“The most meaningful part of her essay was what she did not say. Out of more than 1,000 words, she devoted exactly two sentences to offering a solution to our immigration problems.
“Allen began by noting that if we ended birthright citizenship, ‘it would bring America's citizenship policies into line with those of most of the rest of the world.’ Sorry, but my mother never bought the ‘all the other kids are doing it’ argument, and neither do I. The U.S. is the gold standard for the rest of the world, not the other way around. I'd prefer to keep things that way.
And finally, a new study from Vanderbilt University takes a hard look at the merit-pay system for teachers and comes up with some interesting conclusions. USA Today covers the study:
“Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.
“The results [.pdf] could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers’ unions.
“The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers' unions have often objected on the grounds that they don't have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels.”