A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing legislation this week designed to help seniors receive their healthcare services at home.

Sponsored by Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) and Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the proposal would empower physician assistants, nurse practitioners and certified midwives to order home-care services for Medicare patients in lieu of sending them to nursing homes.

Proponents of home care say it grants more freedom and leads to better care for some of the nation's frailest people, while also cutting healthcare costs by reducing the need for extended stays in nursing homes. 

“We have a responsibility to provide America’s seniors with high quality health care, and a key part of that is ensuring they have timely access to home health care services,” Schwartz said in a statement. 

The trustees faulted two key parts: insulating those over 55 from changes and repealing the healthcare reform law

The top Democrat on the Appropriations Health subcommittee is calling for heightened investment in food safety after a new audit of 17 recent food recalls raised new concerns.

The Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General warned that the Food and Drug Administration's guidance was not adequate to protect the nation's food supply because it's not enforceable. The audit also said FDA "did not always follow its own procedures for ensuring that the recall process operated efficiently and effectively."

"With 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and over 3,000 deaths each year caused by foodborne illnesses, it is critical that the FDA have the tools and authority it needs to protect American consumers," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said in a statement. "The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law last year, is a great first step toward strengthening and modernizing our food safety system, but the Office of Inspector General's report clearly shows that there is room for significant improvement in the FDA's recall of unsafe food, specifically imported food."

The Senate Finance Committee is launching a probe into medical device maker Medtronic over doctor payments, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The National Institutes of Health launches a website with videos to teach people how to live with diabetes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rules abortion protesters don't have a First Amendment right to write slogans in chalk on the White House sidewalk.

Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) spearhead a letter requesting the FDA regulate tobacco candy.

THE LEDE: The Obama administration had to do some damage control Tuesday after the Associated Press reported that healthcare reform could add as many as 3 million middle-class people to Medicaid rolls because of changes in the way Social Security income is counted for eligibility purposes.

Republicans quickly latched on to the report, arguing that the policy shift could cost up to $450 billion over 10 years. GOP governors are also raising concerns.

"The discovery will boost Republican governors' argument that Obamacare's rules concerning Medicaid don't make sense," the Republican Governors Association said in a release. "Republican governors have long been advocating that the Medicaid provisions in Obamacare are in desperate need of reform. … The time when federal Democrats can shrug their shoulders and ask everyone to trust them is over."

Late Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it was reviewing the issue.

"We are concerned that, as a matter of law, some middle-income Americans may be receiving coverage through Medicaid, which is meant to serve only the neediest Americans," HHS spokesman Richard Sorian wrote on the HHS blog. "We are exploring options to address this issue, so that we can use taxpayer dollars responsibly while ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable, high quality health insurance coverage."

Millions of waivers: Five million people will eventually ask for waivers from part of the healthcare reform law, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) predicted Tuesday. Republican senators also argued that the administration's decision to extend the waivers through 2013 was aimed at avoiding bad press in an election year. Healthwatch's Sam Baker has more.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t assess whether medical-device recalls are successful, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The FDA doesn’t have clear policies in place to determine whether a recall worked and doesn’t analyze individual recalls in search of more fundamental problems, the GAO said. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) released the report Tuesday.

“Right now, it looks like the FDA is missing an opportunity to proactively identify and address risks presented by unsafe devices,” Grassley said in a statement. “Doing so would establish greater accountability for patients.”

Five million people will eventually ask for waivers from part of the healthcare reform law, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) predicted Tuesday.

The Health and Human Services Department has granted 1,433 waivers, covering 3.2 million people. The department announced last Friday that those waivers, originally granted for one year, can be extended until 2014 and new waiver requests won’t be accepted after Sept. 22.

“Why are they giving all these waivers? Well, it's because of the policies of this administration,” Barrasso said at a news conference Tuesday. “This has been a nightmare for this administration. And frankly, you look at it, it's an embarrassment.”

He predicted a “tidal wave” of waivers as the September deadline approaches and said he expects that 5 million people will ultimately seek the exemption the waivers provide.

“I think every American ought to be able to get a waiver from this health care law and every employer, because we want to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to create jobs in the country,” Barrasso said. “And this health care law is making it tougher and more expensive.”

The waivers exempt companies from the healthcare law’s restrictions on annual benefit limits. Benefit caps become illegal in 2014, a ban that phases in over the next three years. The waivers allow plans to keep their existing benefit limits if complying with the new law immediately would cause a dramatic hike in premiums.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) is co-sponsoring legislation requiring the Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, a priority for House Democrats in the ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations.

The bill, cosponsored by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), could save up to $156 billion over 10 years according to its proponents, but it's vehemently opposed by the pharmaceutical industry. The provision was in the House-passed healthcare reform bill but didn't make it into the final bill.

"The ability to negotiate the cost to taxpayers of prescription drugs purchased through the Medicare program could be a substantial savings at a critical moment," Emerson said in a statement. "Before we ever trim benefits to senior citizens, we must consider the efficiency of the programs that serve them. We have a duty to the taxpayer to get the best bang for the buck, especially on costly pharmaceuticals for which the federal government facilitates purchases in such large quantities."

Local, state and federal agencies should consider the potential public health impacts of major legislation and regulations such as agriculture subsidies, zoning decisions and education policy, the Institute of Medicine argues in a new report.

The proposal is not unlike environmental assessments required since the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. It's included in the second of two reports on public health strategies sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The recommendation comes as House Republicans are leading the charge to curtail regulations, but IOM experts defended their approach in a conference call with reporters.

"We … think it's worth looking at what the health implications are of different alternatives, so that they can inform the ultimate decision-making," said Steven Teutsch, the vice chairman of the IOM committee that wrote the report. "It's not a particularly pro-regulatory or anti-regulatory approach, but it's a balanced approach that needs to be applied. So whether you're in favor of school vouchers or whether you're in favor of increasing spending by local communities on education, you can evaluate the health impacts of these different modalities."

"This might be viewed as another level of regulatory activity," added committee member Leslie Beitsch, "but it might also be viewed as a common sense approach to make sure that things are considered together for their total impact on society in the larger sense."