Nursing homes create more jobs nationwide than any other healthcare employer except hospitals, according to data the industry plans to release Wednesday. The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care hopes the data will help make the case against further Medicare cuts to nursing homes, especially as cash-strapped states have already looked to the industry for Medicaid savings.

Alliance President Alan G. Rosenbloom said the new figures are intended to illustrate nursing homes’ economic and job-creating value as Congress weighs Medicare cuts to curb the deficit. Nursing facilities are already getting hit with $30 billion in cuts because of the healthcare reform law and previous regulations, Rosenbloom said, and the facilities depend increasingly on Medicare to stay open and fully staffed.

The liberal Campaign for America's Future (CAF) is urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to hold a vote on the House Republican budget, which includes Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) plan to replace Medicare with subsidies to buy private insurance. 

The House passed the Ryan budget along party lines, 235-193, just before the spring recess. Democrats have spent the past two weeks hammering away at it, especially its Medicare proposal, which the Congressional Budget Office says would raise healthcare costs on seniors.

"This Republican budget plan is an outrage. The more Americans learn about it, the angrier they get," CAF co-director Robert Borosage said in a statement. "Bring it to a vote. Force a debate on it. Let Americans know exactly where their senators stand."

Medicaid is rapidly becoming a managed-care program in states across the country, writes Kaiser Health News.

Arizona is drawing protests over its proposed Medicaid cuts, Reuters reports. 

Turning Medicaid into a block grant to states would harm poor seniors, says a new report from the National Senior Citizens Law Center.

The share of medical students who want to enter primary care has dropped sharply over the past two decades, according to a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Many Medicare patients aren't taking care of prevention tests that the healthcare reform law made free, reports Kaiser Health News.

The U.S. lacks robust data on the health of its children and the quality of their healthcare, says the Institute of Medicine. 

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) is getting an earful from angry constituents over his support for the GOP's Medicare plan, reports the Orlando Sentinel.

Federal regulators want to simplify warning labels on medications, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The Supreme Court raised free-speech concerns with state laws that ban drugmakers from using prescription drugs to market to doctors, Reuters reports.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says curbing childhood obesity will require improving children's environments as much as their eating habits.

The liberal group EMILY's List got an early start Wednesday on its efforts to promote candidates for Congress.

The group, which promotes Democratic women who support abortion rights, named four candidates on its early "On the List" roster, flagging the candidates for EMILY's List members.

The group named Lois Frankel (Fla.), Ann Kirkpatrick (Ariz.), Ann McLane Kuster (N.H.) and Christie Vilsack (Iowa) as the first four candidates to the new, early list. The foursome includes some of the most highly touted Democratic recruits this cycle, and seen as virtual locks to secure support from EMILY's List through the 2012 cycle.

"Women across the country are fired up over the extreme anti-woman agenda moving forward in the House and we are seeing women jump into races earlier than ever this year," said the group's president, Stephanie Schriock. "EMILY’s List wants to help them now. ‘On the List’ provides us with a way to get in faster and introduce our members to these great candidates right away."

Kirkpatrick is a former one-term congresswoman who lost in 2010 to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and is looking to reclaim her seat. Christie Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa and the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, is likely to challenge Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in a redrawn district next fall.

Liberals were heartbroken when Kuster fell short in her effort against Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.), but will try again in 2012. Frankel, meanwhile, is hoping to unseat freshman GOP firebrand Rep. Allen West next fall.

Voters are just as opposed to slashing children's healthcare programs as they are to cutting Medicare, according to a new poll by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

The poll was commissioned by the children's advocacy group First Focus. It seeks to demonstrate that the House Republican budget's $750 billion cut to Medicaid is as unpopular as plans to replace Medicare with subsidies for private insurance. 

Seventy percent of respondents somewhat or strongly opposed the GOP budget's cut to Medicaid, versus 27 percent in favor. The poll also indicated strong opposition to proposed cuts to the Children's Health Insurance Program (73 percent to 23 percent).

Also, 64 percent of respondents said they opposed giving state governors the flexibility to drop some children off of the rolls.

"The American people are sending a message that is loud and clear: don't cut kids," First Focus President Bruce Lesley said in a statement. "Many recent spending proposals have sacrificed the needs of children in order to protect the interests of others. However, results from this survey prove that protecting programs that improve the well-being of children is immensely important to voters. We urge policymakers to heed the priorities of their constituents by holding children harmless as they work to find solutions to our nation’s budget challenges."

The poll, conducted April 13-18, has a 3.1 percent margin of error.

The anti-poverty group ONE launched a new public service announcement Tuesday aimed at getting lawmakers and world leaders to fund a program that makes vaccines more widely available to children in poor countries, especially in Africa.

The campaign is targeted specifically at a pair of vaccines that the group says would prevent several of the "biggest killers of children in the developing world." The PSA says the vaccines are among the most cost-effective ways to save children's lives. 

The group said its goal is to pressure world leaders for financial commitments ahead of a conference scheduled for June. It estimates that funding the vaccine program, called The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, would save 4 million lives over the next five years. 

For the second time in less than two weeks, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) raised eyebrows Tuesday with a tepid endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) Medicare reform plan.

Ryan's proposal to replace Medicare with subsidies to buy private insurance was a central part of the GOP's 2012 budget blueprint, which sailed through the Republican-controlled House on April 15 on a party-line vote of 235-193. But in an interview with ABC News this week, Boehner called the Ryan Medicare plan "an idea … worthy of consideration;" two weeks ago, the Speaker called it "an option worth considering."

"I'm for it," Boehner told the news channel. "It's our idea. Right? It's Paul's idea. Other people have other ideas. I'm not wedded to one single idea, but I think it's — we have a plan."

Democrats have been hammering away at the Ryan Medicare proposal's growing unpopularity throughout the spring recess. The liberal group Americans United for Change immediately blasted out Boehner's latest comments under the headline "Say what??"

AARP's lobbying expenses are back down to their usual levels after a large spike at the end of last year, according to a review of lobbying records.

The seniors lobby has been in the GOP's crosshairs since it supported the healthcare reform law, but legislative counsel David Certner told The Hill that the spending patterns don't correlate with a recent investigation by House Republicans. Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee have raised concerns about AARP's insurance royalties and have called for an investigation by the IRS.

"Their inquiries to us started in the fall of 2009," Certner said. "So this goes back to the healthcare reform debate."

AARP reported spending $5 million on lobbying in the first three months of this year, a 45 percent drop from the $9.12 million spent during the last quarter of 2010. AARP has been spending between $4 million and $6 million per quarter over the past couple of years, the organization tells The Hill, but last quarter's spike coincided with the election and a major Medicare bill.

The Obama administration's new top official for health information technology said Tuesday that he hopes to minimize the government's role in getting doctors and hospitals to go paperless, but that some federal action is necessary.

The administration over the past two years has provided billions of dollars in incentives for providers to switch to electronic records. That upfront investment was vital, said Farzad Mostashari, but the private market will now likely take off and respond to growing demand for systems that protect patients' private records.