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Emergency state legislation that will help Maryland health care leaders figure out how to put their share of $5 billion in federal money to use in a high-risk insurance pool has passed committees in both the House and Senate.

The bill, introduced last week after President Barack Obama signed the national health care reform bill, first paves the way for the Maryland Health Insurance Plan to continue operating as the state’s insurance pool for individuals with chronic and other costly health conditions who cannot afford to purchase coverage from a commercial carrier.

Money from the federal government — perhaps 1 percent to 2 percent of the $5 billion — would then enable MHIP to lower its premiums for coverage and eliminate a policy that denies coverage or makes it more expensive for individuals with pre-existing health conditions such as diabetes who previously were not covered by a private health plan.

The legislation — filed at House Bill 1564 and Senate Bill 1125 — passed the House Health and Government Operations Committee on March 27. It was approved by the Senate Finance Committee on March 25.

If the measure is passed by both sides of the state legislature and signed into law as expected, the benefits could take effect as soon as June, said Richard Popper, MHIP’s executive director.

“We could cut our premiums within 60 days,” he said bad credit pay day loans. “The national health care reform gives states the money to make it happen.”

Under the national health care reform, about 32 million more individuals will be required to have health insurance by 2014. In the meantime, the federal bill calls for the creation of a temporary national high-risk insurance pool that would lower the cost of coverage for millions of uninsured individuals.

Still, details regarding how Maryland’s 7-year-old high-risk insurance program will mesh with the new federal one need to be ironed out. Popper said eligibility requirements for the federal program may differ slightly from those imposed by MHIP.

As many as 70,000 uninsured Marylanders could benefit from the expansion of MHIP’s coverage, according to testimony Popper presented to members of the Senate Finance Committee on March 25.

MHIP already covers more than 17,000 Marylanders. Its enrollment grew about 15 percent in recession-soaked 2009, as more individuals joined the program after losing their job or their employer cut benefits.

Baltimore-based CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the region’s largest health insurer, administers claims for MHIP, which replaced the state’s Substantial, Available and Affordable Coverage plan in July 2003.

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Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust CEO and founder Steven D. Hayworth has replaced Adolfo Henriques as chairman of the Coral Gables-based bank.

In September, a group of more than 50 local investors led by Hayworth bought the bank from Boston Private Financial Holdings, where Henriques is a board member. During the negotiations to sell the bank to the local group, Henriques took over as chairman.

The former CEO of Florida East Coast Railway, Henriques remains on the board of Boston Private cash advance no fax.

“I will miss my friends on the Gibraltar Private board, but I leave knowing that Steve and his team have created a terrific private bank and wealth management company that will serve our community well in the future,” Henriques stated in a press release.

Gibraltar Private Bank lost $20.2 million in 2009 and ended the year with $1.5 billion in assets.

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Consumer prices in February rose from a year ago amid higher energy costs, but the pace of price increases slowed for the second straight month, the government reported Thursday.

The Consumer Price Index, the government’s key inflation measure, rose 2.1% over the past 12 months, driven by a 37% climb in gasoline costs during the period. In January, prices climbed 2.6% from the previous year.

The so-called core CPI, which is closely watched by economists because it strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 1.3% over the past year, the smallest gain since February 2004.

February. For the month, overall prices were unchanged as declining energy prices offset increases in prices of food and other items. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com were expecting prices to rise 0.1%. Prices rose 0.2% in January.

Food costs edged up 0.1% during the month, while energy prices fell for the first time since April 2009, posting a 0.5% decline. The drop was due to a 1.4% dip in gasoline prices.

Core CPI for the month rose 0.1%, in line with economists’ expectations and up from the 0.1% decrease in January instant payday loan.

Medical care costs rose for a second straight month and prices of new cars and used cars and trucks were also higher. The costs of clothing and airline fares decreased, while housing costs held steady.

The tame inflation reading supports the Federal Reserve’s decision to continue to hold its key interest rate near zero.

"Core inflation continues to be a non-issue in the near-future, so the Fed’s easy monetary policy can continue into the third and fourth quarter of this year without inflation being an issue," said Adam York, an economist at Wells Fargo.

He added that the oversupply in the housing market will continue to put downward pressure on home prices, which will hold core inflation low for up to a year.

"When the housing market returns to a normal level and then home prices begin rising, inflation will pick up, probably in early 2011" he said. "It will pick up steam throughout next year as we see the economy recover." 

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Prices at the wholesale level plunged in February by the largest amount in seven months as a big drop in energy prices offset higher food costs.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that wholesale inflation dropped 0.6 percent, much larger than the 0.2 percent decline economists expected. Excluding food and energy, prices edged up a slight 0.1 percent, in line with expectations.

The deep recession and weak economic rebound are keeping inflation at bay and giving the Fed leeway to maintain record low rates in an effort to build momentum from stronger economic growth.

While overall wholesale prices have risen 4.4 percent over the past 12 months, core inflation, which excludes energy and food, is up a much more subdued 1 percent over the past year.

Economists said they expect inflation pressures to ease even more in coming months because many of the dampening effects on inflation from the steep recession have yet to be felt guaranteed high risk personal loans.

Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, said he expected the 12-month rate for core wholesale prices to dip from the current 1 percent to below zero in coming months.

The 0.6 percent fall in Labor’s Producer Price Index in February was the biggest decline since a 1.2 percent drop last July. In January, wholesale prices surged by 1.4 percent, driven by rising energy costs. Last month, energy prices plunged by 2.9 percent with most of that decline reflecting a 7.4 percent drop in gasoline costs.

However, gasoline pump prices have resumed rising over the past few weeks and now stand at a national average of $2.79 according to automotive club AAA’s daily fuel gauge. That is up from $2.62 a month ago and $1.91 a year ago.

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Orlando-area hotel occupancy was 67.3 percent for the week of Feb. 28-March 6, up 11.1 percent from 60.6 percent the year prior, said Smith Travel Research.

Average daily room rates for that period were $101.54, up 0.8 percent from $100.77 last year.

In addition, revenue per available room — a barometer of the hotel industry’s health — was $68.32, up 12 percent from $61.02 a year ago.

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It looks like ice — but this ice could one day be used to heat your home.

It’s actually not ice at all, but crystallized natural gas, and if scientists can figure out how to harvest it cheaply enough, it could become a vast new source of energy available in just about every country in the world.

The big advantage to these crystals, known as methane hydrates, are their abundance. They are found beneath the sea floor off every continent, and under the arctic tundra.

Plus, they’re estimated to hold twice as much carbon as all the known reserves of oil, coal and natural gas combined.

"The potential is enough to power humanity from now until the asteroid hits," said Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial, a Calgary-based private equity firm.

But citing cost and the abundance of conventional natural gas, Tertzakian said this resource will likely "remain on the margins" for two or three decades.

Origins

The crystals are formed when methane gas, which results from the natural decomposition of animals and plants, comes into contact with water at just the right temperature and pressure.

Finding that sweet spot is actually much much more common than finding the conditions needed for the formation of conventional gas and oil, which require very specific geology. This is why oil is found in some places but not others.

Crystal gas forms almost any place there’s low temperature, high pressure and water, making the organism-rich continental slopes ideal spots.

The gas crystals are usually found between a few hundred feet to several thousand feet below the ocean floor and require deep drilling to bring them to the surface. They’re most prevalent in water over 1,000 feet deep, and up to about 200 miles offshore.

Although they’ve been known about since the early 1980s, only in the last 10 years has significant work gone into studying them and figuring out how to extract them.

The U.S. government currently runs a multi-agency research project with scientists from the Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service, among others instant credit report. They’ve partnered with a few corporations, including BP (BP) at a site in Alaska’s North Slope and Chevron (CVX, Fortune 500) in the Gulf of Mexico.

Harvesting

Just because a huge amount of the gas exists doesn’t mean it all can be collected.

No one has figured out how much gas can be recovered using current technology, said Timothy Collett, a research geologist at the USGS.

But at the BP site in Alaska, Collett said using current technology to go after crystal gas would effectively double the known gas reserves there.

"We’re chipping away at the technical issue," he said. "We just have to get at the economics."

And it’s the economics that really hold this up.

There are several ways to bring crystal gas to the surface. But the most efficient seems to be to drill a well, like a conventional oil or natural gas well, then decrease the pressure inside. The decreased pressure will cause the crystals to revert to gas and flow out of the well.

But depressurizing a well requires creating a vacuum by continuously pumping the water out of it. That’s an expensive proposition.

Collett said in the Arctic, the cheapest place to extract this gas, costs vary. It can be just as expensive as it is now to produce conventional natural gas, to twice that amount. Going offshore gets even more expensive.

Furthermore, with all the gas currently coming online in the United States from the vast shale reserves, it’s doubtful crystal gas is going to see much investment in the near term.

"Why would anybody allocate money to gas hydrates, when there’s almost a gas glut emerging," said Tertzakian, the economist at ARC.

Yet once the shale gas begins to run out, or if there’s a significant increase in demand for cleaner burning natural gas plants, it may be nice to know this resource is available.  

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the euro region is ready to rescue Greece should the government struggle to fund its budget deficit, arguing that the country is “under attack” from so-called speculators.

“I want to be very clear: if it were necessary, the states of the euro zone would fulfill their commitments,” he said in Paris yesterday after a meeting with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. “There can be no doubt in this regard.” While Greece doesn’t need assistance right now, “we have measures, we are ready, we are determined,” he said.

Sarkozy’s comments are among the strongest by an EU leader to signal the bloc would bail out Greece as they try to warn investors off making further bets against the euro and Greek bonds. Papandreou’s government last week passed a further round of austerity measures and sold 5 billion euros ($6.8 billion) in government debt. Europe’s single currency has dropped 8 percent in the past three months.

“Speculators and the markets should know that solidarity means something and that, if there’s a problem, we are there,” said Sarkozy. “The sooner we say that and the more firmly we say that, the more rapidly we settle the problem.”

The spread between the yield on Greek 10-year bonds and their German counterparts fell to the lowest in three weeks on March 3. Papandreou, who meets President Barack Obama in Washington tomorrow, said he wants a “normalization” in Greek market interest rates after the deficit-cutting steps.

Greece faces more than 20 billion euros in debt redemptions in April and May.

Green Light

Sarkozy wouldn’t say what steps the EU would take and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who runs Europe’s largest economy, has so far refused to give the green light to any aid package. Merkel said after meeting Papandreou on March 5 that the question of a bailout “‘absolutely doesn’t arise.” Her coalition partner, Guido Westerwelle, said he won’t sign a “blank check” for Greece.

“Nobody can doubt how reluctant the Germans are, and I am starting to think that if official money is needed in May, then there may first be a major discussion between the Germans and the French how to do this,” said Erik Nielsen, chief European economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in London, in an e-mailed note. “It really comes down to some very fundamental issues of how the euro-zone will function going forward.”

European Monetary Fund

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble indicated that his government is already thinking about how another Greek crisis can be avoided, saying that the euro region should consider creating an institution similar to the International Monetary Fund.

“We shouldn’t rule anything out, including the creation of a European Monetary Fund,” he said in an interview with the Welt am Sonntag newspaper published yesterday.

The comments come after proposals for a European Monetary Fund were put forward last month by Deutsche Bank AG Chief Economist Thomas Mayer and Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

The EMF could ease the disruption caused by the failure of a euro member to pay its bills by offering investors new EMF bonds in exchange for the defaulted securities, they said. Investors would be required to take a “haircut.”

“Setting up a European Monetary Fund is superior to the option of either calling in the IMF or muddling through on the basis of ad hoc interventions,” Mayer and Gros wrote in an article in the Economist last month.

Flaws in the euro region’s governance were also indentified by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who said in an interview on March 6 that the lack of a political union to back up the European Central Bank is a “structural crack.”

“Maybe fortunately it’s tested with a country as small as Greece, which doesn’t present an insuperable financing problem,” he said.

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Toyota executives told lawmakers Tuesday that its U.S. and Canadian divisions will have more authority to decide when to issue a recall as the automaker faces mounting pressure from Washington over its recent safety problems.

Toyota has recalled millions of vehicles worldwide for problems related to sudden acceleration, which have been blamed for several accidents resulting in injuries and death. The automaker has repeatedly apologized for the lapses in quality control and Toyota technicians are working extended hours to repair the recalled vehicles.

Under new plans to improve quality control, Toyota’s North American operations "will have more autonomy and decision-making power with regard to recall and other safety issues," Yoshimi Inaba, president and chief operating officer of Toyota North America, said in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Inaba also announced that Rodney Slater, a former U.S. Transportation Secretary, will head a "blue ribbon" panel to review Toyota’s own investigation into its global operations.

Toyota came under fire last week during two separate House hearings for the automaker’s management structure, which some lawmakers said gives Japanese executives too much power over U.S. operations.

"For the future, our U.S. staff will have a clear decision-making role," Shinichi Sasaki, executive vice president at Toyota Motor in charge of quality assurance and customer service, told the committee. "Ultimately, our goal is for the United States to have an even greater voice in decisions on recalls and other safety and satisfaction issues."

In response to questioning, Sasaki acknowledged that Toyota’s North American management were not included in the recall decision-making process in the past. Speaking through a translator, he said that this policy may have caused "some concern or suspicion."

He said Toyota will deploy the new system immediately should the company issue another recall.

Questions unresolved

At the conclusion of the hearing, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the committee’s chairman, said key questions remain unanswered about Toyota’s safety record.

"We feel some frustration in trying to communicate or effort to get to the bottom of some of the questions," he said, adding that the frustration was due in part to the language barrier.

"It’s the question of accountability," the senator said. "I think there is more knowledge at the table than has disclosed itself."

Rockefeller also pledged to work on "comprehensive legislation" aimed at improving how the government regulates the auto industry. "The American people deserve a top-to-bottom review, not just on past errors, but on the road ahead," he said.

He said Congress should consider, among other things, making brake override systems mandatory for all automakers and require senior executives to legally certify information submitted to safety regulators.

Since 2000, there have been 43 complaints of fatal incidents that allegedly involve sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.

While those complaints have not yet been confirmed, the reported incidents involve 52 fatalities and 38 injuries, NHTSA said.

The sudden acceleration issue has been in the spotlight since it was disclosed last month that an accident involving a Toyota vehicle killed four people in San Diego last August free credit scores.

That accident sparked the recall of millions of Toyota vehicles for problems with floor mats that could cause accelerator pedals to become trapped. Toyota has subsequently recalled millions more cars for "sticky" accelerator pedals.

"It’s clear that somewhere along the way, public safety took a back seat to corporate profits," Rockefeller said.

Akio Toyoda, the company’s president, acknowledged last week that Toyota’s rapid growth over the last few years has contributed to the recent safety problems.

Concern about electronics

However, some lawmakers and outside researchers have suggested that sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles could also be caused by defects in its electronic throttle control system (ETCS).

Toyota maintains that electronics are not to blame for sudden acceleration.

"As a result of our extensive testing, we do not believe sudden unintended acceleration because of a defect in our ETCS has ever happened," Uchiyamada said. "However, will continue to search for any event in which such a failure could occur."

LaHood said NHTSA is conducting a review of the electronic throttle control system in Toyota vehicles. He also said the Transportation Department may recommend that all cars sold in the United States come equipped with a brake override system.

Lawmakers criticized NHTSA for failing to respond sufficiently to reports of sudden acceleration dating back several years. "The public’s trust has been compromised and the system has broken down," Rockefeller said.

LaHood, who was named Transportation Secretary in January 2009, defended his agency.

"NHTSA has a very aggressive enforcement program," he said. "We stand ready to ensure prompt action on any additional defects that we have reason to believe are present."

Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, told the committee that regulators need to enact radical reform and that lawmakers should provide additional resources to ensure effective oversight.

"The government has to totally revamp its investigatory system," said the Center for Auto Safety’s Ditlow. "It has to realize that it’s the cop on the beat, not Mr. Nice Guy."

Toyota has also come under fire for a 2009 memo in which staffers boasted of the company saving $100 million by negotiating with U.S. regulators for a limited recall for certain cars.

In response to a question about the 2009 report, David Strickland, NHTSA’s administrator, denied that the agency has shown Toyota any preferential treatment.

"The claims that Toyota made about negotiating or influences are false," he said. "That document has no foundation."

Inaba, whose name appeared on the document, said it was prepared before he rejoined the company and was inconsistent with Toyota’s "guiding principle."  

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Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that government action has helped start an economic recovery, but that he’s worried about the state of the job market.

Bernanke also changed his stance and said he’d be willing to consider supporting some legislation that’s pending before Congress that would make the Fed more accountable.

In testimony about monetary policy before the House Financial Services Committee, Bernanke noted that the recession continues to abate, but not when it comes to the job market, which "has been hit especially hard," he said.

"The job market remains quite weak, with the unemployment rate near 10 percent and job openings scarce," Bernanke said.

The Fed chairman said he’s particularly worried about the long-term impact on workers skills and wages and the increasing incidence of long-term unemployment.

"Indeed, more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work six months or more, nearly double the share of a year ago," he said.

Bernanke also said that he expects inflation to remain in check for some time, as oil prices have flattened out and housing costs have risen very slowly, thanks to high vacancy rates.

"According to most measures, longer-term inflation expectations have remained relatively stable," he said.

Over the past year, Bernanke has faced a mixed reception whenever he’s appeared on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers credit him for pulling the economy out of the greatest recession since the Great Depression. But they also blame him for missing signals of the recession and for overlooking consumer protections.

However, the Senate voted overwhelmingly in January to confirm him for a second term.

Before Bernanke spoke, several Republican lawmakers said they particularly wanted to ask the Fed chairman about why the job market remains weak, even though Congress passed a massive $700 billion stimulus package last year quick payday loans.

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., noted that after the stimulus package passed, fewer jobs were lost.

"It is possible to debate what is the best way to do the stimulus, but no sensible human being can deny that the stimulus had a positive effect," Frank said.

Frank asked Bernanke, specifically, whether stimulus helped stem job losses and Bernanke answered "Yes.""I think most economists would agree that the stimulus created jobs, relative to the baseline," Bernanke said.

Surprising endorsement

Bernanke also said he is prepared to support pendinglegislation authorizing Congress’ Government Accountability Office to audit "the operational integrity, collateral policies, use of third-party contractors, accounting, financial reporting, and internal controls of these special credit and liquidity facilities."

Previously, Bernanke has fought any move by Congress to audit the Fed. But his new support is for a limited audit that would not venture into monetary policy.

He also said he now supports revealing the names of firms who got emergency cheap Fed loans during the financial crisis, "after an appropriate delay." The Fed has, in the past, fought such revelations.

But he drew the line at making immediately available the names of banks coming to the discount window on a short-term basis, saying it could undermine confidence.

– CNN senior producer Scott Spoerry contributed to this report 

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