At a news conference at the State Capitol Tuesday Sen. Jon Erpenbach and Rep. Jon Richards announced a new bill to roll back Governor Walker’s slashing cuts to BadgerCare. They were joined by health care advocates and BadgerCare enrollees to unveil a bill which will take away the power of the Walker Administration to force [...]

Milwaukee health insurance 27 percent more costly than Madison, and much lower quality Citizen Action of Wisconsin released its 6th Annual Wisconsin Health Insurance Cost Ranking report earlier this week on a state-wide media call. On the media call to comment on the report were Congressman Ron Kind, State Senator Jon Erpenbach, State Representative Jon [...]

Wisconsin’s low-income citizens are in deep financial stress. Under the current budget, Gov. Scott Walker plans to cut $554 million to Wisconsin’s BadgerCare and Medicaid programs over the next two years. That’s $554 million from health services offered to low-income families, children, adults, seniors and individuals with disabilities. $554 million from detrimental programs designed to [...]

Compiled by Courier Staff Once again the African American community will have the opportunity to exercise their power through voting. This Tuesday, April 5, 2011 people in Milwaukee will head to the polls, and this time efforts have to be made to get it right. The U.S. Census Bureau has confirmed that African Americans are [...]

Increased access to health care services for children through the BadgerCare Plus program qualified Wisconsin for a federal bonus of $23.1 million for this year, federal officials announced today. The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) provides performance bonus payments to encourage states to enroll more uninsured Medicaid-eligible children and help offset [...]

For many residents of Wisconsin and Milwaukee County, the recession has dealt a double blow. They have lost both their jobs and their health insurance. A new county-level analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) examines the impacts of the recession on families across the state, based [...]

Madison – Representative Jon Richards (D-Milwaukee), chairman of the Assembly Committee on Health and Healthcare Reform and member of the Joint Committee on Finance, appeared Monday, Dec. 27 on the PBS Newshour in a report on how Wisconsin is implementing the federal health reform legislation. The story stressed the need to go forward with reform [...]

Richards demands Van Hollen report on attorney time being devoted to politically-driven lawsuit Madison — State Rep. Jon Richards (D-Milwaukee), member of the Joint Committee on Finance and Chair of the Assembly Committee on Health and Health Reform, urged Governor-elect Scott Walker and Attorney General J.B Van Hollen to stop preparing a politically-motivated lawsuit to [...]

BadgerCare Plus & ACCESS.Wisconsin.gov Programs cited for innovative, customer-focused approaches MADISON – Wisconsin ’s BadgerCare Plus program received a national “Innovation” award recently from the Council on State Government (CSG) and its ACCESS selfservice web portal received an honorable mention in the Stockholm Challenge, an international award program for projects using information and communication technology [...]

BadgerCare is an important program in my community, and it is an important program in so many other communities around the state of Wisconsin. The families of Wisconsin have been on BadgerCare since 1999, and the program has only seen success and expansion. It is a program that includes not just individuals, but our spouses [...]