As if things weren’t bad enough for poor ole Chris Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut today at a press conference at 2pm in Hartford, Connecticut is expected to announce that he has early stage prostate cancer. The Banking Committee Chairman and defacto chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in …
Congress
Re: Not So Fast
Pushback on yet another front: The emerging deal the bipartisan negotiators of the Finance Committee (whom some of their colleagues have begun to refer to as “the Coalition of the Willing“) isn’t going over so well with all the Democrats on the panel.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, who chairs Finance’s health subcommittee (and who hasn’t …
Not So Fast
Just as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus was heading to the mircophones yesterday to announce that “things are looking good” for his group of six bipartisan negotiators, one of those negotiators, Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, the top Republican on the HELP Committee, was putting out this statement:
Subject: Enzi: Deal Far From
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Health Care: Are the Republicans Negotiating for Real?
That was the question I had for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, when a group of journalists met with him this afternoon at the White House. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has infuriated his Democratic colleagues in the Senate with his insistence on continuing to try to get a health care deal that a few …
Hatch to Vote No on Sotomayor
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, today said he would not vote for President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. The decision is a surprising blow to Sotomayor as Hatch not only voted for the last 12 nominees to the bench — Republican or Democrat — but he also …
Health Care: Follow the Money?
Swampland commenters are constantly exhorting me on the link between health industry campaign contributions and the difficulties that health reform is having getting through Congress. There is indeed a lot of money being lavished on the key players in this fight, and there is a lot of good reporting being done on that. There should be,
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The House Bill and Health Care Costs
Back when I was in the newspaper business, there used to be a kind of story that we called a “clip and save”–a clear, concise explanation of something that you wanted to keep handy for reference as you wrote your own stories about a complicated subject. If there’s an internet equivalent of that for health geeks (and for voters trying to …
The Health Care Push
In advance of Obama’s prime-time news conference tonight, here’s a look at where things stand.
Graham Becomes 5th* Republican for Sotomayor
When President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor made her rounds on Capitol Hill, one of her harshest critics was South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham who said after that first meeting that he was “deeply troubled” by her nomination. Something must have happened on the way to the hearings last week because on …
Health Care: Obama Engages More Deeply
Is Barack Obama finally channeling LBJ to save his health reform initiative? As we’ve noted before, the President until now has stayed away from the nitty-gritty of the negotiations on Capitol Hill, largely because he wants to avoid the mistakes that the Clintons made in 1993, when they tried to dictate to Congress precisely how to …
Health Reform, Medicaid and the Governors
A look at why cash-strapped Governors are resisting one of Washington’s biggest ideas for expanding coverage.
UPDATE: The NGA has sent this letter to Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley. Also, here’s their latest assessment of the economic situation in the states: Grim and getting grimmer.
The Mayo Clinic Diagnoses the House Health Bill
Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the
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Health Care and the GOP
I’m guessing that the word “experiment” was pretty effective with the focus groups:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAnpL752syM&hl=en&fs=1&]
(Via our friends at C-SPAN)