The funding contained in the $26 billion federal legislation for New Mexico’s Medicaid program is $56 million below the $160 million the state had anticipated. That means the state budget gap New Mexico is struggling to address for the fiscal year that began July 1 will grow to about $220 million.

Despite not being the amount anticipated, the federal funding comes at an opportune time for New Mexico, which had been considering drastic cuts to Medicaid, the government’s low-income health insurance program, to help balance the state’s budget.

“This money is critical to help reduce drastic cuts to the Medicaid program,” Gov. Bill Richardson was quoted as saying in a news released issued by his office Wednesday. “I especially want to acknowledge Senator Bingaman’s key role in moving this funding forward. I’m hopeful for a positive vote by the full Senate and quick action by the House so we can protect Medicaid services in New Mexico.”

New Mexico over the past year has considered making deep cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance for more than 400,000 New Mexicans, as state revenues have failed to keep pace with expenditures during the economic downturn.

The New Mexico Legislature approved a state budget for the year that began July 1 assuming that Congress would approve $160 million for the state in additional Medicaid funding. The failure to get the entire $160 million means that New Mexico’s state budget gap for this fiscal year will grow to around $220 million after state officials last month projected that there already was a $160 million gap between expenditures and revenues.

The U.S. Senate voted 61 to 38 to avert a GOP filibuster of legislation that would send $16 billion in extra Medicaid dollars to states, the paper reported. That money is direly needed in New Mexico, state officials have said.  Wednesday’s vote means it’s plausible for the Senate to vote on the legislation this week, which would send it to the U.S. House of Representatives.

New Mexico built the state budget that started July 1 on the assumption that Congress would extend stimulus funding for Medicaid through the end of the fiscal year, next June.  But so far that hasn’t happened, meaning the federal Medicaid funding runs out Dec. 31, 2010. The federal legislation before the U.S. Senate could change that.

State officials have said that the lack of extra Medicaid funding could leave New Mexico with a potential $320 million hole for this budget year. State officials projected last month that New Mexico already is $160 million in the hole. No extra Medicaid stimulus funding would mean New Mexico would face  an additional $160 million hole over the already-existent $160 million state budget gap. Medicaid is the government’s low-income health insurance program.

While the bill before the Senate would give states more Medicaid dollars, it’s unclear how much of the $160 million hole would be covered by the federal legislation.

Some state lawmakers already have started planning for less than the $160 million in extra Medicaid funding they anticipated in this year’s budget.

New Mexico isn’t alone. Thirty states budgeted the anticipated Medicaid dollars in hopes that Congress would extend the deadline.

In a story published today Politico quotes several Republicans who acknowledge the strategy, including one former GOP presidential candidate.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Hopefully, we will have an election cycle where we will have a strong wave coming in that is opposed to this and can oppose the funding and the implementation of this,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, who is running for governor of Kansas this fall. The law “has to be funded to be implemented.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (David Becker/ZUMApress.com)

This week, Senate Democrats will attempt to push through a jobs bill that has stalled in the chamber for seven weeks. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) filed for cloture on Monday afternoon, leaving just days before a vote on the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, or House Resolution 4213, a $23 billion bill to extend federal unemployment benefits and other emergency stimulus measures. The cloture motion signals that Reid believes he has the votes to pass the long-mired legislation. But there are still signs that the contentious, job-saving bill might not pass — leaving people on unemployment benefits, doctors and states in financial limbo.

Calling for an end to debate on the floor, Reid warned, “We’ll learn a lot this week about who wants to fix problems, and who wants to make excuses.” He castigated the opposition party’s intransigence: “If Republicans have their way, next week will be yet another without a lifeline for the most needy, those willing and wanting to work. The other side has slowed and stalled just about every piece of legislation this year — just as they did last year and the year before that.  That’s not a secret. The numbers don’t lie, and Republicans make no efforts to hide their strategy of delay.”

What is at stake? If Congress does not pass the bill, hundreds of thousands will lose their federally extended unemployment insurance. Doctors will take a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement rates, possibly causing them to drop needy patients. Starting in December, the federal government will provide less backing to the Federal Medical Assistance Percentages program, or FMAP, which provides states with money for Medicaid so that the “poorest of the poor,” in Reid’s words, can see doctors.

The bill has broad support, but not broad enough. Reid needs a Republican to cross the aisle to vote for the legislation, and needs to hold the Democratic coalition together. As of Monday, that was not happening. The floor debate was contentious — with Republicans bashing what they view as Democrats’ free spending, and Democrats detailing the impact of job losses and the possible effect of Medicaid cuts in their states. No Republicans have yet come out in favor of the bill, with moderate Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), Scott Brown (Mass.) and Susan Collins (Maine) apparently remaining in opposition. Additionally, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has signaled that he might not vote for the bill as it ups deficit spending.

That means that Democrats might need to pare down the bill. And changing it comes with its own problems. The Senate has altered the House version enough that Congress will need to reconcile the versions or the House will need to re-approve the bill. Differences between the two might make that difficult: Moderate “Blue Dog” House Democrats, for instance, successfully fought for the removal of the $24 billion in Medicaid funding — which Reid hopes to keep in. And every week that Congress does not approve the bill is another week that thousands of the long-term unemployed go without unemployment insurance checks.

Against this backdrop of contentious fighting over deficit spending, President Obama has renewed calls for more stimulus to battle sky-high unemployment rates. Fifteen million Americans — about 9.7 percent of the work force — remain jobless. In a letter to Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama called unemployment a “crisis” and asked the congressional leaders to pass Medicaid funding as well as a new provision to save local workers’ jobs.

“I am concerned … that the lingering economic damage left by the financial crisis we inherited has left a mounting employment crisis at the state and local level that could set back the pace of our economic recovery,” Obama wrote. “The lost jobs and foreclosed homes caused by this financial crisis have led to a dramatic decline in revenues that has provoked major cutbacks in critical services at the very time our Nation’s families need them most. … [If] additional action is not taken hundreds of thousands of additional jobs could be lost.”

McConnell responded, “[B]ecause Democrats can’t seem to resist any opportunity to use a must-pass bill like this as a vehicle for more deficit spending, they’ve piled tens of billions of dollars in unrelated spending and debt on top of it, all at a moment when the national debt has now reached $13 trillion for the first time in history. This is fiscal recklessness, plain and simple.”

Republicans last week released a counterproposal to the Democrats’ jobs bill. But it funds the new jobs bill out of stimulus spending and forces across-the-board governmental budget cuts (exempting defense spending). Democrats oppose the measure.

The open government group is pairing CSPAN coverage of the deliberations alongside facts and figures—such as campaign contributions—related to the debate and the debaters.

The members are expected to meet sporadically over the next two weeks, but Sunlight intends to cover it all, so bookmark that link.

Here’s an example of what it looks like. In this example, Sen. Richard Shelby is shown on CSPAN, talking, while Sunlight displays his campaign donations immediately to the right.

Below this on the site is a live blog pane similar to the one we use:

The corrections sector directly employs 770,000 people, a number that is expected to grow by up to 16 percent by 2016, the report states — despite modest declines in U.S. prison populations since 2008.

Prisons also fuel a multi-billion dollar contract services industry that employs tens of thousands more to build prisons and provide inmates with health care, education, and food, according to the report.

In contrast, the entire U.S. automobile industry employs about 880,000 workers, the report states.

Most new prisons built nationwide between 2000 and 2005 are run by private companies. Corporation-owned prisons now house 16 percent of federal prisoners, the report states.

Because the U.S. Census counts inmates as residents of the counties in which they are incarcerated, prisons can dramatically distort the distribution of federal programs for which funding formulas include population, the report notes.

CRS reports are prepared as primers for U.S. senators and representatives, but are not intended for public release. But the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy and Open CRS routinely obtain and post them on the web.

However, at the very beginning of the e-mail is a reminder that the Senate has not yet passed health care reform; the House passed health care reform in November.

“I believe we had a productive year in Congress – one that brought great benefits to New Mexico. There are still many New Mexicans suffering as a result of this economic downturn, and while major indicators suggest we have turned a corner, I know that too many people are still out of work,” Bingaman wrote. “When the Senate begins our second session this January, I will be working to pass legislation that helps generate new jobs in New Mexico and across the country.”

First, however, the log jam in the Senate over health care reform will have to be broken.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (WDCpix)

Senate Democrats will return to Washington Monday to begin a long-awaited floor debate on the health-reform bill they hope to pass before Christmas. But it’s hardly the last battle they’ll be forced to wage on the health-care front.

As tough as the upper-chamber debate promises to be, many of the thorniest conflicts will likely be re-contested when Democratic leaders in both chambers meet, probably in January, to iron out the differences between their bills. The legislative disparities revolve around such high-profile topics as the public option and coverage of abortion, but also include lesser-noticed issues, like whether to honor a White House deal with the pharmaceutical industry and how to approach the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Senate Republicans are also eyeing many of these hot-button issues, with hopes of using them to divide the Democrats in order to kill the larger bill. But with the considerable House-versus-Senate discrepancies awaiting conference negotiators, fending off opposition from Senate Republicans in the meantime could prove to be the least of the Democrats’ troubles as they attempt to pass the most consequential health-care reforms in generations.

Who Pays?

Chief among the differences between the Democrats’ bills is how each chamber has proposed to pay the considerable cost of covering tens-of-millions of uninsured Americans. The House pays the freight largely with a 5.4 percent tax on the nation’s highest earners — individuals making more than $500,000 per year, and families pulling in more than $1 million.

The Senate, on the other hand, has proposed an excise tax on the highest-cost insurance plans — those exceeding $8,500 for individual coverage and $23,000 for families. The Senate bill would also apply a 0.5 percent Medicare payroll tax to individuals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000.

Liberals and labor unions have supported the House approach, arguing that an unprecedented tax on insurance plans would erode decades of work to secure comprehensive, employer-sponsored health-care coverage for workers. Conservatives, meanwhile, are warning that higher taxes on the wealthy will only exacerbate the nation’s economic troubles in the middle of an employment crisis.

Coverage vs. Care

Both the House and Senate bills rely heavily on a Medicaid expansion to cover the country’s poorest uninsured residents. The House would extend eligibility to 150 percent of the federal poverty level (net income), while Senate eligibility would expand to 133 percent of poverty (gross income).

The more significant difference, though, revolves around Medicaid reimbursement, which is so low in some states that many doctors and dentists now refuse to see Medicaid patients. The House bill recognizes the problem, bumping up Medicaid payments for primary care services to 100 percent of Medicare rates by 2012. Despite an effort to get similar language into the Senate legislation, a controversial funding proposal kept the provision out of the final bill.

The reimbursement increase doesn’t come cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the provision would cost $28.7 billion over the next five years and $57 billion over the next 10.

Abortion

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) lit a firestorm earlier in the month when he amended the House bill to prohibit abortion coverage under subsidized exchange plans. The Senate bill would also ban federal funding of abortions, but would allow women receiving exchange-plan subsidies to segregate their premiums and co-payments in order to access abortion services. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has already said that he’ll offer the Stupak provision on the floor, though supporters will have the difficult task of rallying 60 votes to pass the measure.

Indeed, the Stupak provision is poised to cause more havoc in the House than the Senate, with some House liberals vowing to oppose the larger bill if the language survives the conference negotiations, while Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats are hinging their support on the provision remaining intact. Satisfying both camps for the sake of the bill’s passage will likely require some delicate wording from Democratic leaders.

Illegal Immigrants

Both chambers propose to screen exchange-plan applicants to ensure that illegal immigrants don’t receive the federal subsidies available to those living below 400 percent of poverty. The Senate bill, however, goes a giant step further, proposing to exclude illegals from purchasing even unsubsidized insurance coverage on the exchange. That provision has riled a number of lawmakers and immigration advocates, who are wondering how allowing folks to buy insurance coverage from private companies with U.S. dollars could harm the country, fiscally or otherwise.

“It makes no sense for anybody,” said Jonathan Blazer, public policy attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. “Nobody’s willing to defend it on policy grounds.”

If the Senate language emerges from the conference negotiations, it will likely lead to a showdown with House members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who early in the debate had threatened to vote against the House bill if it excluded illegal aliens from unsubsidized exchange coverage.

CHIP

Though largely unmentioned throughout the health reform debate, the House billwould terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program at the end of 2013, shifting those kids into Medicaid or private plans on the exchange. House leaders — who had championed CHIP for the past 12 years — say their proposal will expand coverage by getting kids and parents under the same plan.

But some children’s health-care advocates have raised alarms over that strategy,arguing that the private plans will likely be more expensive, thereby discouraging low-income parents from getting their kids any coverage at all. And Sen. Jay Rockefeller agrees. The West Virginia Democrat — who successfully amended the Senate bill to reauthorize CHIP through 2019 — is vowing to fight to keep the program intact.

“Health care reform should improve the coverage children have,” he said, “not take their coverage away.”

Rockefeller, though, has been a lonely voice in support of preserving CHIP, leaving the ultimate fate of his amendment in question.

The Big Deal with Big Pharma

In June, Democratic leaders in the White House and Senate caused a stir when they announced a deal with the pharmaceutical lobby. Under that bargain, the drug companies promised $80 billion over the next decade to close Medicare’s drug-coverage gap (partially) if the lawmakers agreed to oppose efforts to empower states to negotiate drug prices for residents enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. The Senate bill keeps that agreement intact, with Finance Committee members shooting down an amendment allowing such price haggling for the sake of closing Medicare’s donut hole altogether.

House Democrats, on the other hand, have said all along that they weren’t a part of the discussions with the drug makers, and they don’t feel bound to any deal they never agreed to. As evidence, the House bill allows states to negotiate drug prices on behalf of their lowest-income seniors — a provision the CBO estimates would save more than $42 billion over the next decade.

The Public Option

At the heart of the debate over health-care reform this year has been the public option — a strategy, popular among liberals and consumer advocates, to create a public, non-profit insurance plan to compete with private companies. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) surprised many political observers last month when he proposed to create such state-based plans in the bill he weaved together from the different proposals passed by the Finance and health committees. Reid’s bill would empower the plans’ administrators to haggle directly with doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers over reimbursement rates, but it would also leave states the option not to participate.

The House bill is similar, but creates a national insurance option rather than numerous state-based plans. Additionally, the House bill doesn’t include the state opt-out language.

Unlike the other topics mentioned here, the toughest fight over the public option seems destined to occur on the Senate floor, rather than in conference. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has repeatedly vowed to filibuster any bill that includes a public plan, whether it’s opt-out, opt-in, trigger-based, or any other configuration. Meanwhile, some upper-chamber liberals — including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Roland Burris (D-Ill.) — are hinging their vote for the health reform package on the inclusion of a strong public option.

“This legislation cannot simply be a huge subsidy to private insurance companies that will get millions of new customers and be able to raise their rates as high as they want,” Sanders said in a statement last week. “I strongly suspect that there are number of senators, including myself, who would not support final passage without a strong public option.”

All of this, of course, could change. Although the House passed its health-care reform bill earlier in the month, the Senate proposal is just hitting the chamber floor today. The upper-chamber is expected to debate the measure through most of December, with hundreds of amendments likely to be offered from both sides of the aisle.

Democratic leaders hope to pass the bill out of the Senate before the holiday recess, pushing the conference negotiations to sometime in January. That 2010 is an election year won’t make those discussions any smoother.

“About half (52 percent) of registered voters would like to see their own representative re-elected next year, while 34 percent say that most members of Congress should be re-elected,” according to Pew. “Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys.”

And, in more bad news for Democrats, Republicans are currently much more enthusiastic about voting in 2010.

There is no jump in support for a third party (a party besides the Democratic or Republican Party), however. In fact, it has fallen to 52 percent from 56 percent in June of 2008. This is far off Pew’s all-time high of 59 percent in October of 1995.

As for President Barack Obama, his approval rating hasn’t seen much change since June. Pew says Obama’s “overall job approval ratings have held relatively steady over the past four months: currently, 51 percent of Americans say they approve of his job performance; this figure has fluctuated between 51 percent and 55 percent since July. The share who disapprove – currently 36 percent – has ranged between 33 percent and 37 percent over the same time period.”

However, the president’s approval rating on how he has handled Afghanistan has tumbled since June — down from 63 percent in June to just 51 percent in November.

Obama’s lowest approval rating on a specific issue is the budget deficit — just 31 percent of Americans approve of how Obama is handling the budget deficit according to Pew.

The poll was conducted from October 28 to November 8 and was of 2000 adults on both cell phones and landlines across the country.