Brussels, Belgium (4E) – The European Commission predicts the eurozone economy will shrink this year as the region’s debt crisis continues to take its toll.

In its spring forecasts, EC officials said that it expects 2012 will see a contractions of 0.3 percent in the economies of the 17 nations that use the euro.

However, it also said that a recovery is in sight and that it expects the eurozone will rebound and grow by 1.0 percent in 2013.

The picture is only slightly brighter when looking at all 27 nations in the European Union. The EC is predicting zero growth, but that is better than a contraction. In addition, the EC expects 1.3 percent growth for the EU region next year.

Nevertheless, the situation remains problematic with disparities in the economies of the eurozone nations, as well as in the economies of the 27 nations in the European Union.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – On Wednesday, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is set to suspend his presidential bid and back Mitt Romney.

In an interview Tuesday with USA Today, Gingrich said he will back Romney’s candidacy and is prepared to campaign for his former foe. In return, Romney will help Gingrich pay off some of his millions of dollars of campaign debt.

Gingrich said, “Mitt Romney met the first criteria of being a good candidate: He won. Now, you have to respect that.”

Gingrich will make the official announcement at 3 p.m. Wednesday in Arlington, Va.

Romney is not scheduled to be there.

It has been a rollercoaster ride for Gingrich, who in January sat at the top of the polls. However, in the months that followed it became apparent he was not a GOP favorite.

Gingrich has maintained that he is committed to the Republican party and his goal is to make certain Obama is not re-elected.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, United States (AHN) – Less than a week after the European Union and Canada lifted most of sanctions on Myanmar, the United States on Wednesday said that it would not immediately end all sanctions.

The remaining sanctions, it said, will be used to push the regime in addressing human rights issue and ending ethnic violence.

Talking to lawmakers, U.S. diplomat Kurt Campbells said that the Obama administration would only lift sanctions in “certain prescribed areas.”

“I would simply say that there is no intention to ‘lift’ sanctions,” Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“We recognize very clearly that there have to be provisions and capabilities to be able to respond if there is a reversal or a stalling out (of reforms), that leverage is an essential component of our strategy,” he said.

Acknowledging Myanmar’s move to release political prisoners, Japan had recently cancelled the country’s debt as a reward.

View full post on All Stories

New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Mortgage rates fell in the week ending April 12.

Fixed mortgage rates slid a full tenth of a percent in the latest week, and mark the third consecutive week of declines, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday

The 15-year fixed rate average hit a new record low of 3.11 percent. That was down from 3.21 percent last week, and way lower than the 4.12 percent one year ago. The previous low for the 15-year was set in March when the average hit 3.13 percent.

The 30-year also headed near its record low of 3.87 percent (set in February), averaging 3.88 percent this week. It has lingered just below 4 percent the last two weeks. At this same period a year earlier, the 30-year averaged 4.91 percent.

The 5-year and 1-year hybrid adjustable rate averages remained relatively unchanged from last week at 2.85 percent and 2.80 percent respectfully.

The drop in mortgage rates was spurred by a disappointing report on jobs growth for the month of March. News that the U.S. economy added just 120,000 jobs renewed fears of whether the economic recovery has legs.

Worries over the mounting and ongoing European debt crisis, coupled with warnings for slowing growth in corporate earnings, also helped push mortgage rates down.

View full post on All Stories

Kansas City, KS, United States (KaiserHealth) – In an ongoing disagreement over how to solve dental care access problems in Kansas, there is one thing no one disputes: the great need.

That need was on display in February when the Kansas Dental Charitable Foundation held its eleventh free clinic of the past decade. Known as the Kansas Mission of Mercy, the clinic was staffed by volunteer dentists in a vacant Walmart store in Kansas City.

Organizer Greg Hill said that patients began arriving at 8 p.m. the night before the clinic opened. They were able to spend the night inside the store. “By 5:30 a.m., there were 1,200 people in the building,” Hill said.

At that point, the parking lot had to be closed, because no more patients could be treated in a single day— even with 165 volunteer dentists and many more hygienists and other support staff from all across the state. By the end of the two-day clinic 2,144 patients had been treated, adding to the total of approximately 20,000 patients served since Mission of Mercy began in 2002.

Analysts have known for years that Kansas has a severe shortage of dentists, and that shortage is getting worse. The problem is greatest in rural Kansas, especially in the western part of the state.

To deal with the shortage, Fort Hays State University President Ed Hammond backs the idea of creating a mid-level dental provider — a person whose training and skills fall somewhere between those of a hygienist and a full-fledged dentist.

Hammond is keen to begin training those providers at Fort Hays State, but the proposal faces strong opposition from the Kansas Dental Association and has bogged down in the state legislature.

Hammond points out that it is not just the poor or uninsured who have trouble accessing dental care in western Kansas. Even a college president can have trouble.

“I can’t get dental services where they accept our Delta Dental Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan,” said Hammond. “As a state employee, I get — and pay for — dental insurance, but the dentists in western Kansas don’t accept it.”

Hammond says he’s had to switch dentists three times to find someone who would accept his dental insurance. There are 13 primary care dentists in the Hays area, but Hammond says only a few accept Delta Dental.

“The shortage is impacting not just the indigent, not just the children. It’s impacting all of Kansans in western part of the state,” he said.

A report published last fall by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the University of Kansas Medical Center counted 1,159 primary care dentists in the 105 counties of Kansas. However, roughly half of them are located in metropolitan Kansas City and Wichita. Add in Topeka and Lawrence, and more than 700 of the state’s dentists are in just four communities.

Most counties in the western half of the state have only one or two dentists, if any. A dozen western counties, plus three more in eastern Kansas, have no dentist at all. Hammond said it’s not hard to understand why dentists are reluctant to set up shop in frontier counties.

“The problem is, the people graduating from dental school are coming out with tremendous debt, and then they have to get a lot of equipment,” Hammond said. “That raises the bar that their practice has to generate a certain amount of resources in order for it to make sense, and so they don’t go to western Kansas and the smaller towns.”

Hammond compared the so-called mid-level dental providers to mid-level medical providers who are already helping meet the need for primary care in rural Kansas.

“We train nurse practitioners that go out to the Hill Citys, the Atwoods, the various different communities throughout the state, and provide medical services. We’re proposing to do the same thing with a mid-level professional in the area of dentistry,” he said.

Hammond said Fort Hays State University is prepared to begin training this new class of dental providers as soon as the legislature approves the proposal. A coalition called the Kansas Dental Project submitted a plan last year. It would create a new type of provider with more training than a dental hygienist, but not as much as a dentist, called a Registered Dental Practitioner, or RDP. The new practitioners would be allowed to fill cavities and do simple extractions of children’s primary teeth.

But the Kansas Dental Association has fought this idea all the way. “The overwhelming majority of dentists are opposed to the registered practitioner model, and it’s not like 99 percent. It’s 99.9 percent,” said Kevin Robertson, who heads the association.

Robertson said the proposal goes too far by allowing RDPs to perform procedures which are, by definition, considered surgery.

“Anything that includes the cutting of the hard surfaces of the tooth is considered surgery,” said Robertson. “The bill is written to allow the extraction of all primary teeth, or meaning baby teeth. Now, a lot of listeners might think, well, baby teeth, I’ve pulled out my son’s or my daughter’s baby teeth. Well, there’s nothing in the proposal that says it has to already be loose.”

And Robertson says what sounds like a simple procedure can suddenly become more than a registered dental practitioner is trained, or licensed, to handle.

“Maybe you’ve snapped off a tooth. You’ve broken it. Maybe the root’s wrapped around the nerve that runs through the jaw, or something like that, and you didn’t know it at the time,” said Robertson. “Those are the types of things that we think could occur and that we’re concerned about.”

Robertson predicted that mid-level providers would actually make it more difficult for dentists to make ends meet in rural areas. He said it would create a two-tiered system of dental care in Kansas: dentists for those in the more-populated areas, and mid-level providers with a lower level of training for rural Kansans.

But others counter that even that scenario would be better than the status quo.

“I would describe no care as second-class care, and that’s the system we have in place now for many Kansans,” said Shannon Cotsoradis, who heads the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children. Cotsoradis is spearheading the Kansas Dental Project, the effort to create licensed, mid-level dental providers.

“Many Kansans, whether they’re low-income, uninsured, or insured through the public health coverage system, can’t access dental care,” Cotsoradis said. ” Our goal is to make sure that all Kansans, regardless of what kind of insurance they may have or whether or not they have insurance at all, can access care, and we believe that adding another member to the Kansas dental team will help ensure that.”

Cotsoradis said the opposition to registered dental practitioners is based on fear and misinformation.

“The research that’s out there says very clearly that mid-level dental providers can provide the same quality and the same level of safety in the care they deliver as a dentist, within their scope of practice, and I would challenge the Kansas Dental Association to produce research that demonstrates something to the contrary,” she said.

Melinda Miner, a dentist in Hays, holds the opposite view of most of her DDS colleagues: She would like to start working with registered dental practitioners.

One of the so-called “dental deserts” identified in the state dental workforce report is just to the south and west of Hays. It’s an area of approximately 500 square miles, where there are no primary care dentists at all. Miner envisions being able to use registered dental practitioners to bring dental care to nearby Trego and Ness counties, which currently have no dentists.

“Our goal would be to open outreach clinics in the surrounding communities for preventive — for cleanings, for check-ups, for small fillings,” Miner said.

Miner said people will drive long distances for major dental problems, but they’re less likely to do so for the kind of routine care that can prevent more serious issues.

“You know, having to take your child out of school, take half a day off work, drive 30 minutes or more to go to the dentist for a routine checkup or preventive care is a lot less likely to happen than if you have a preventive person in your town,” said Miner.

The proposed law would require registered dental practitioners to spend their first 500 hours of practice under the direct supervision of a licensed dentist. That means they’d start out in the Hays clinic, just down the hall from Miner and her husband, who is also a dentist. Once they’re placed in the outreach clinics, they’d be under “general supervision.” Miner said telemedicine would make it possible to supervise a practitioner work without being at the same location.

“All of our x-rays are on the computer. They can call at any time and ask a question. They can send us a photograph or an x-ray, and ask us our opinion. You don’t have to be there in person to watch over somebody,” she said.

Miner sees mid-level providers not as a threat to her practice, but as a way to make it more efficient and to expand her patient base.

“Every dentist can run their practice how they want to, and I don’t want to tell a dentist, ‘Hey, you have to take Medicaid or you have to see people for free, or you have to use a hygienist,’” she said. “There are dentists who don’t want to use hygienists. That’s fine for their practice, but I would prefer if they don’t tell me I can’t do something that would help my practice to be better.”

The Kansas Dental Association does support expanding the role of dental hygienists. They’ve endorsed a bill to create what’s called an Extended Care Permit 3. It would allow specially-trained hygienists, under the sponsorship of a dentist, to provide temporary fillings, adjust dentures, and remove very loose baby teeth. Their services would be aimed at underserved children, senior citizens, and people in various forms of state care or custody. Those favoring creation of Registered Dental Practitioners say this bill would help, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Kansas is among 15 states where advocates are working to expand the dental workforce with mid-level dental providers. So far, Alaska and Minnesota are the only states where these providers have been authorized.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (ProPublica) – by Marian Wang

It was with some fanfare that the Obama administration announced last fall that it was ramping up a program to help students with federal loans reduce their monthly payments. Under the program, payments are adjusted based on how much students earn — what’s known as income-based repayment.

Yet, even while the administration has emphasized easing the burden for student borrowers, some contractors with the Department of Education appear to be exacerbating it.

Bloomberg reported this week that some federally contracted debt collection agencies have been playing hardball with borrowers who are behind:

insisting on payments the borrowers can’t afford;

even when federal student-loan rules allow more leniency.

The debt collectors have an incentive to be tough. As Bloomberg explains:

Under Education Department contracts, collection companies “rehabilitate” a defaulted loan by getting a borrower to make nine payments in 10 months. If they succeed, they reap a jackpot: a commission equal to as much as 16 percent of the entire loan amount, or $3,200 on a $20,000 loan.

These companies receive that fee only if borrowers make a minimum payment of 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the loan each month, depending on its size. For example, a $20,000 loan would require payments of about $200 a month. If the payment falls below that figure, the collector receives an administrative fee of $150.

The Department of Education is trying to balance its interest in helping struggling borrowers and stewarding taxpayer dollars, department spokesman Justin Hamilton told Bloomberg.

Striking that balance, it seems, hasn’t been easy. Consumer advocates chafed when President Obama, as part of a deficit-reduction plan promoted last fall, recommended allowing debt collectors to robo-call the cell phones of borrowers who fell behind on federal student loans and other debts to the government.

That plan didn’t get far. But the measure resurfaced as a line item in Obama’s proposed 2013 budget last month.

As Bloomberg noted, federal student-loan rules require that collectors work out “reasonable and affordable” payments with borrowers to get them back on track, but the rules don’t spell out how such a calculation should be made. The Department of Education is meeting with key student-loan stakeholders this week to discuss, among other things , whether to use the income-based repayment formula to help set that standard. (As it stands, only borrowers who are current on their federal loans are eligible for help via income-based repayment.)

One thing that isn’t on the table at these rule-making meetings? A measure hailed by some advocates as potentially the single most important rule change for student borrowers who’ve become severely disabled and are seeking a discharge of their federal student loans. As we reported last year, the department initially pledged to overhaul the program and consider whether to simply accept Social Security determinations of disability instead of its current complex and opaque process. The department subsequently backed off that fix. Now it isn’t even on the agenda .

– Provided by ProPublica.org

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee surprised no one today when he released a spending blueprint that would drastically reshape the Medicare and Medicaid programs for the elderly and poor in an attempt to rein in their soaring costs.

Democrats predictably pounced on the proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, making clear they would make it a major campaign issue.

The GOP document projects an estimated $205 billion in Medicare savings over President Barack Obama’s proposed budget over ten years.

The plan, which the committee will consider over the next couple of weeks, would cap Medicare spending at Gross Domestic Product plus 0.5 percent. It would turn Medicaid over to the states in the form of a federal block grant, “constraining Medicaid’s growing cost trajectory by $810 billion over ten years,” according to the document, which said:

“If Congress wants to avoid defaulting on federal health and retirement programs, it must adopt a program of gradual adjustment now – one that frees the nation from the shadow of debt, strengthens its health and retirement safety net, protects those in or near retirement from any disruptions in their benefits, and supports robust economic growth and job creation. Otherwise, the nation will face more significant, unpopular and immediate overhauls later.”

In Ryan’s 2012 budget resolution, which the House approved, federal spending on Medicare would have been limited to GDP plus 1 percent. Since then, President Barack Obama proposed a tighter cap, at GDP plus 0.5 percent, which is the same as Ryan’s plan today.

Ryan’s Medicare proposal is nearly identical to a premium support idea that he put forward in December with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and to one that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney crafted a month earlier in November. Ryan’s new budget would provide a set amount of money for future Medicare beneficiaries – those currently under the age of 55 – to purchase either a private health plan or the traditional government-administered program through a newly created Medicare exchange. That would begin in 2023.

All plans, including traditional Medicare, would submit bids for how much they would charge to cover a beneficiary’s health care costs. The government would pay the full premium for the private plan with the second lowest bid, or for traditional Medicare, whichever is lower. Beneficiaries would have to pay the difference if they chose a plan that set rates higher. There could be one less expensive plan option, and beneficiaries who chose it would get a rebate for the difference.

Private health plans would have to be at least actuarially equivalent to the coverage offered in the traditional, government-administered option. That means that the benefits could vary, but the value of the plan would have to remain the same.

In a presidential election year, proponents welcomed the Ryan-Wyden promise of traditional Medicare as more politically palatable than Ryan’s proposal from last year, which would have allowed only private plan options. And they expected that Ryan would include it in the 2013 budget.

But some critics are already arguing that the government-administered option would not be affordable and that it could cause doctors to leave the program. Critics have argued that the government-run plan would attract the sickest people, driving up its costs, while private plans would lure the healthiest.

Ryan makes it clear in his proposal that the cost to beneficiaries would be determined solely by competitive bidding between the private and public plans. If Medicare spending exceeded GDP plus 0.5 percent, then, other savings would have to be found in the program, and politicians have a long history of cutting payments to doctors, hospitals and other medical providers.

Democrats – ignoring Wyden’s role – vowed to launch a sweeping campaign against the Medicare proposal. A “Medicare Madness” graphic topped the website of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Tuesday, which in a memo said it would “hold targeted Republicans accountable with automated and patch-through phone calls, citizen phone banks, earned media events, op-eds, letters to the editor, a new online Medicare Action Center, and paid advertising to be announced later in the Medicare March campaign.”

The White House criticized the budget blueprint as providing tax breaks for wealthy Americans, oil companies and Wall Street on the backs of seniors. “All of these tax breaks would be paid for by undermining Medicare and the very things we need to grow our economy and the middle class – things like education, basic research, and new sources of energy,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “And instead of strengthening Medicare, the House budget would end Medicare as we know it, turning the guarantee of retirement security into a voucher that will shift higher and higher costs to seniors over time.”

Wyden, anticipating backlash from his own party, defended his partnership with Ryan in a column on Huffington Post Monday even as he distanced himself from the overall GOP budget proposal – “I can’t imagine a scenario where I would vote for it.”

He said “unless Congress enacts meaningful Medicare reform in the near future, seniors will be faced with inevitable cost-shifting and eventual benefit cuts until Medicare doesn’t look anything like the program does today.”

Even if the House passes the budget resolution, the Senate is unlikely to follow suit. And even if it did, budget resolutions are non-binding and don’t establish law. However, the process lays an important foundation for positioning over Medicare, which is already proving contentious in presidential and congressional campaigns.

Both houses of Congress are unlikely to consider legislation to overhaul Medicare or Medicaid until a new Congress – and possibly a new president – are seated in 2013. But Congress is expected to return to Washington after the election to consider major deficit reduction legislation. If lawmakers fail to reach agreement, automatic spending decreases will take effect starting in 2013, and Medicare spending would be cut by 2 percent – all from payments to hospitals and other care providers.

Today’s budget proposal also would prohibit Congress from using spending reductions in Medicare for other purposes. That would “stop the raid on the Medicare trust fund that was going to be used to pay for the new health care law. Any current-law Medicare savings must go to saving Medicare, not the creation of new open-ended health care entitlements,” according to the document.

Ryan would attempt to lower health care costs by capping non-economic damages (pain and suffering) awards in medical malpractice law suits.

The proposal also would repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board that the health law created to hold Medicare spending to GDP plus 1 percent. Ryan calls it “the unaccountable panel of 15 unelected bureaucrats empowered by the President’s health care law to cut Medicare in ways that would lead to denied care for seniors.”

Marilyn Werber Serafini is the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Robin Toner Distinguished Fellow based at Kaiser Health News. The fellowship honors the late Robin Toner, The New York Times’ long-time health and politics reporter whose work often framed the public debate on health issues. KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

View full post on All Stories

New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Stock index futures point to extended gains for Wall Street Friday as traders remain upbeat on the U.S. economy.

Shortly before the opening bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 38 points to 13,209, the Standard & Poor’s 500 futures eked up 3.3 points and the NASDAQ futures climbed 8.8 points.

The closely watched S&P benchmark, because of its diversity, surpassed the 1,400 threshold Thursday for the first time since before the 2008 financial crisis. All three indexes have made impressive gains in recent trading sessions.

The markets in general have gotten a lift from optimistic data on the recovering U.S. economy, coupled with easing fears about the European debt crisis.

Market participants will be eyeing three key economic reports on Friday.

Before the open, a report on Inflation at the consumer level showed an increase of 0.4 percent in February, in line with estimates, with a spike in gas prices accounting for almost 80 percent of the rise. Excluding the food and energy components, prices were up 0.1 percent, slightly less than the 0.2 percent forecast.

Later on Friday, data from the Federal Reserve is expected to show production in the U.S. industrial sector grew at 0.4 percent in February from the prior month. Two regional manufacturing reports came in ahead of expectations on Thursday.

Also expected is a report on consumer sentiment which is expected to show a very slight, but positive, rise in early March. Rising gasoline prices may have also taken its toll here, too.

In premarket trading, oil rose 40 cents to $105.51 a barrel, and gold gave back $13,00 to $1,646 a troy ounce.

View full post on All Stories

London, United Kingdom (AHN) – European Central Bank (ECB) officials left the benchmark interest rate of 1 percent unchanged. The bank has not changed the rate since November.

The ECB has provided European banks with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of loan-interest loans in an effort to keep financial markets supplied with cheap cash. The ECB also has bought government bonds from countries such as Spain and Italy in an effort to help lower borrowing costs for governments within the troubled eurozone that have been hit by the sovereign debt crisis.

ECB president Mario Draghi says that the strategy of loosening credit has improved the risk environment.

However, the strategy isn’t expected to help the eurozone economies to grow.

The ECB revised its previous forecast that called for growth and now expects the eurozone economy to shrink by 0.1 percent this year. It was the third consecutive quarter the ECB revised its economic estimate downward.

It also revised downward its growth forecast for 2013 to 1.1 percent compared with the earlier forecast of 1.3 percent growth.

Moreover, ECB officials also now say that they expect inflation to grow at a faster pace than the bank’s medium-term target rate.

View full post on All Stories

Denver, CO, United States (AHN) – A new report has found that the cost of repairing and expanding drinking water infrastructure in the United States will exceed $1 trillion in the next 25 years.

In addition, the groundbreaking study by the American Water Works Association found that expense will likely be met primarily through higher water bills and local fees. The cost of needs will double from around $13 billion a year now to roughly $30 billion (in 2010 dollars) per year by the 2040s.

AWWA is an international nonprofit scientific and educational society that focuses on the improvement of drinking water quality and supply.

The organization analyzed many factors for its new report, titled “Buried No Longer: Confronting America’s Water Infrastructure Challenge.” Those factors included the timing of water main installation and life expectancy, materials used, replacement costs and shifting demographics. AA

AWWA found that needs in the U.S. are nearly evenly divided between replacement and expansion requirements.

“Because pipe assets last a long time, water systems that were built in the latter part of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th century have, for the most part, never experienced the need for pipe replacement on a large scale,” the report states. “The dawn of an era in which the assets will need to be replaced puts a growing stress on communities that will continue to increase for decades to come.”

“The needs uncovered in ‘Buried No Longer’ are large, but they are not insurmountable,” said AWWA Executive Director David LaFrance. “When you consider everything that tap water delivers-public health protection, fire protection, support for the economy, the quality of life we enjoy-we owe it to future generations to confront the infrastructure challenge today.”

Although the world has as much water now as it did thousands of years ago, only about 1 percent of the world’s water is available for human needs, including personal, agricultural and manufacturing. Almost 97 percent of the world’s water is saltwater or brackish and another 2 percent is locked away in glaciers and ice caps.

Key findings from the report include:

• The needs are large. The cost of replacing pipes at the end of their useful lives will total more than $1 trillion nationwide between 2011 and 2035 and exceed $1.7 trillion by 2050.
• Household water bills will go up. Although water bills will vary by community size and geographic region, for some communities the infrastructure costs alone could triple the size of a typical family’s bill.
• There are important regional differences. The growing national needs affect different regions in different ways, with growth concerns greater in the South and West and replacement concerns greater in the Northeast and Midwest.
• There are important differences based on system size. As with many other costs, small communities with fewer people to share in the costs face the biggest challenge.
• The costs keep coming. Infrastructure renewal investments are likely to be incurred each year over several decades. For that reason, many utilities may choose to finance infrastructure replacement on a “pay-as-you-go” basis rather than through debt financing.
• Postponing investment only makes the problem worse. Postponing infrastructure investment in the near-term would raise the overall cost and increase the likelihood of water main breaks and other infrastructure failures.

View full post on All Stories