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WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has received another recommendation to broaden the nation's health-care system to protect the uninsured poor.Various health policy experts estimated that the cost to the federal government would be at least $4 billion a year. Medicaid, a state-federal program, already finances health care for 27 million poor Americans.A report drafted for an advisory panel appointed by the administration is recommending that Medicaid be expanded to cover doctors' services and hospital care for an estimated 10 million people below the poverty level who have no insurance.

ANNAPOLIS -- A January summit conference raised the issue of health care reform with sound and fury. But at the end of the General Assembly's regular session last night, the legislature had little to show for its efforts to make health care more available and affordable to Marylanders."

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The good news on AIDS: Nearly a million people began life-prolonging drug treatment in developing countries last year. The bad news: 2.5 million people were newly infected with HIV. As new infections continue to far outstrip efforts to treat the sick, the United Nations released a progress report yesterday that highlighted both the notable gains in combating the AIDS epidemic and the daunting scale of what remains to be...

Bethesda -- With a populist message and a few digs at the front-runners, politics professor and commentator Allan J. Lichtman entered the race for the U.S. Senate yesterday. Though he has never run for office, Lichtman told a crowd of supporters gathered at the North Bethesda Middle School that he will capture the Democratic nomination and win the general election by waging a grass-roots campaign against corporate interests and the Washington establishment. "I am running to change what is wrong in Washington," he said.

ANNAPOLIS -- A plan to take Maryland one small step closer to a comprehensive reform of its health-care system cleared its first major legislative hurdle yesterday.The bill in itself is a modest reform aimed at making health insurance more affordable by more evenly spreading the risk among small companies, those least able to offer coverage to their workers.But the legislation, known as "small group market reform," is considered the second step toward what some hope will emerge as a system that provides affordable coverage to the estimated 640,000 Marylanders who have no health insurance at all."

Eager, smart, broke and discouraged, Anne Arundel County Young Democrats are pinning what little hope they have on Bill Clinton.The presidential candidate lost his national front-runner status this week, but the Arkansas governor remains the favorite with local Democratsbetween 18 and 25, an often-overlooked group and possibly the most despairing segment of the population."

BOSTON -- The Democratic Leadership Council may conside Bill Clinton's victory a vindication of its moderate approach, but Jesse Jackson has signaled that he is ready to engage party centrists in a tug of war over the election laurels.Speaking to Boston Globe reporters and editors, the civil-rights leader contended yesterday that a sluggish economy, the end of the Soviet threat and other overarching factors, and not Mr. Clinton's campaign tactics or his attempts to appeal to the moderate mainstream, had determined the election.

An interesting bit of history was played out this week at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. The institution was established in 1916 as the first public health school in America, with a grant of $267,000 from John D. Rockefeller Jr., who came to Baltimore to deliver the check. Last Tuesday John D. Rockefeller IV -- the benefactor's grandson and now a U.S. senator from West Virginia -- came in his famous forbear's footsteps to deliver the annual J. Douglas Colman lecture at the school -- and a sharp lecture it was.Although the two men are two generations removed, their hope is strikingly similar.

In recent years, as public concern grew about the number of people without health insurance coverage, a number of insurers devised "bare-bones" plans with affordable premiums. The problem is that you get what you pay for.Lower costs means fewer benefits and big deductibles. So it is no surprise that these plans have yet to catch on in a big way. Last month Families USA, a consumer advocacy group, released a report detailing the market failure of "bare-bones" health plans in the 16 states where they are available.

CHICAGO - To critics of the American health care system, Shangri-La is not a fantasy but a shimmering reality, though it goes by another name: Canada. Recently, the Canadian Supreme Court, ruling on a challenge to the health care system in the province of Quebec, sent a clear message south: Don't believe the hype. The health care program, said the court, has such serious flaws that it is violating constitutional rights and must be fundamentally changed. And the flaws are part of the basic structure of Canada's health care policy.