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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Thursday proposed cutting Medicaid reimbursements, salaries for state employees and extra funding for the state’s most expensive school systems, setting up an immediate test of the call for bipartisanship he issued a day earlier at his inauguration. (Wagner and Wiggins, 1/22)

Del. Maggie McIntosh, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said she has a lot of questions about how the overall budget plan would affect state employees, health care and K-12 education in all counties. Hogan’s plan would reduce rates paid to Medicaid healthcare providers to fiscal year 2014 levels, which would save about $160 million. The plan also calls for state employee compensation adjustments to save $156 million. (1/22)

Gov. Larry Hogan may have sent a message of “tolerance and mutual respect” during his inauguration on Wednesday, but advocates for the state's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community say his early actions in office have signaled something different. In one of his first acts, Hogan held up a regulation that would have banned Medicaid providers in the state from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, according to state officials. The provision was proposed in recent months under the administration of Hogan's predecessor, Martin O'Malley, at the urging of LGBT groups. (Rector, 1/22)

Medicaid recipients in Wisconsin would be required to undergo drug testing and could be limited in how long they can receive benefits under measures proposed Thursday by Gov. Scott Walker, who is positioning himself as a reformer as he eyes a 2016 presidential run. The idea, which Walker first proposed during his re-election campaign, will be included in his state budget released to the Republican-controlled Legislature on Feb. 3. Walker announced for the first time Thursday that the plan would apply to childless adults on Medicaid, as well as those applying for or receiving aid from other state benefit programs. (Bauer, 1/22)

Idaho's health care system for the poor has been stretched to its limits and needs an overhaul, the program's director said Thursday. The Catastrophic Health Care Cost Program handled fewer cases last year than it had previously, but it continued to be burdened by issues such as mental health care, Roger Christensen told state budget writers. (Krusei, 1/22)

A bill that would boost telemedicine in Colorado by preventing health insurance plans from requiring in-person care to patients when it can be appropriately provided remotely progressed to the House floor on a unanimous committee vote Thursday. The House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee approved a bill that would expand a current law supporting telemedicine — care delivered via a computer, smartphone or other device — only for patients residing in counties with 150,000 or fewer residents. (Draper, 1/22)

While a handful of states have passed or are considering right-to-die laws, a Rhode Island lawmaker wants the state to give terminally ill patients the "right to try." Democratic Rep. Joseph McNamara says his bill is the opposite of laws that allow terminally ill patients to legally take their live. It would let them obtain experimental drugs that have not been federally approved. (McDermott, 1/22)

Federal prosecutors should launch a civil rights probe into the 2013 death of a mentally ill Rikers Island inmate who was locked in his cell for six days without care or medication, a state oversight panel concluded in a review that called the treatment "so incompetent and inadequate as to shock the conscience." Bradley Ballard, a 39-year-old paranoid schizophrenic with diabetes, died shortly after a doctor finally went into his cell and found him naked, covered in feces and badly infected from a piece of cloth he tied tightly around his genitals. (Pearson, 1/23)