NM Voter Roll Reveals Dead People and Foreign Nationals
FCC to Offer Lower Cable Rates for Low Income Families
Future Taxpayer Handouts: One-Stop-Shop Online
Santa Fe New Mexican - In a few years, low-income New Mexicans applying for Medicaid could do so online and learn at the same time if they also qualify for food stamps, emergency food assistance or child support. Finding out if you're eligible for Medicaid, the government's low-income health insurance program, or other government aid isn't that easy right now. Currently, a person can apply for Medicaid at offices around the state or can print out online applications, fill them out and then mail them in or hand-deliver them, said Matt Kennicott, a spokesman for the New Mexico Human Services Department. But times are a-changin'.
New Mexico is in the middle of a systemic overhaul of the technology running the state's health care system as it and other states prepare for the rollout of the nation's health care law in 2014. Decisions being made now will alter how people apply for certain government programs and how the state processes billions of dollars in Medicaid expenses every year. Medicaid covers more than 550,000 New Mexicans, or one-quarter of the state's population. In September, the state approved a a $75 million contract with Deloitte Consulting LLP to develop a new Medicaid eligibility process to replace a state computer system that has operated since the mid-1980s on technologies developed in the 1970s, according to state documents. The new system will roll "all our programs into one eligibility system," Kennicott said. At the same time the design of the new eligibility system has started, New Mexico is negotiating with an unidentified firm on a years-long contract worth $100 million that will update how Medicaid expenses are processed and paid. In addition to that, New Mexico should learn in a week or two whether it has qualified for $34 million in federal grant money to help set up a centerpiece of the new federal health care law, a state exchange. Read full story here: News New Mexico
Oh Christmas Fee Oh Christmas Fee!
Salazar's New Order Contradicts 2010 Order
Weeks after the infamous BP oil spill in late-April 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency that managed leasing and regulation, was split up into three parts. Addressing the reorganization, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said: “We will be able to strengthen oversight of the companies that develop our nation’s energy resources.” He addressed a perceived conflict of interest between departments due to the leasing and regulatory functions being in one agency—one brings in revenue and one regulates (and perhaps punishes) the businesses generating the income.
His mid-May 2010 actions bring his new Secretarial Order to reorganize a different agency into question. On October 26, 2011, Secretary Salazar signed Secretarial Order 3315 that will consolidate the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The Order states that “fee collections” and “regulation, inspection and enforcement, and state program oversight” will now be integrated—the very tasks split out within the MMS reorganization. Because this new order seems in direct contradiction to the 2010 SO 3299, it raises suspicion as to the true purpose of the agency reorganization—especially since the impacted industry is the administration’s favorite villain—coal. Read full column here: News New Mexico
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| Marita Noon |
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| Ken Salazar |
GPS Tracking Devices Help Crime Investigation
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