1. President Obama calls for cuts in Medicare. 

Here are excerpts from his March 24 prime-time news conference:

"At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down in the long run is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt.  It's with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest. That's what an efficient health care system that controls costs and entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid will do.

"And-and so what we're trying to emphasize is, let's make sure that we're making the investments that we need to grow to meet those growth targets, at the same time we're still reducing the deficit by a couple of trillion dollars, we are cutting out wasteful spending in areas like Medicare, we're changing procurement practices when it comes to the Pentagon budget, we are looking at social service programs and education programs that don't work and eliminate them.

"QUESTION:  But even under your budget, as you said, over the next four or five years, you're going to cut the deficit in half, then, after that, six years in a row, it goes up, up, up. If you're making all these long-term structural cuts, why does it continue to go up in the out-years?

"OBAMA:  Well, look, it is going to take a whole host of adjustments, and we couldn't reflect all of those adjustments in this budget.  Let me give you an example.

"There's been a lot of talk about entitlements in Medicare and Medicaid.  The biggest problem we have long term is Medicare and Medicaid.  But whatever reforms we initiate on that front-and we're very serious about working on a bipartisan basis to reduce those deficits or reduce those costs-you're not going to see those savings reflected until much later. "

2. The "stimulus" bill makes $268 million available to hospitals that serve uninsured persons.

Charles Johnson, the Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced that the recently enacted "stimulus" bill will increase funding from $11.06 billion to $11.33 billion for Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH), which provide most of their services to persons with no health insurance. 

"Thousands of hospitals around the country are the only place where some of the more than 45 million uninsured Americans can receive some form of health care," Johnson said.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will notify states about the availability of the money.  However, since not all states spend their full DSH allotments, before this new funding can be accessed, states must demonstrate they have spent all of their existing allotments.

 A complete list of the revised DSH allotments that include additional funding provided through the "stimulus" bill is available online at http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/cms/dshstates.html.

HHS also has a website promoting all of its activities under the "stimulus" bill, including those by CMS and the Administration on Aging, at www.hhs.gov/recovery. 

A federal website to tout all of the government-wide projects in the "stimulus" bill is available at http://www.recovery.gov/.