As the health care debate focuses on whether cost cuts are looming in Medicare coverage, Representative Henry A. Waxman is on a crusade to save Medicare billions of dollars — in a way that he says would end up helping the elderly.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts — the scion of an American political dynasty who became an iconic liberal legislator — died Tuesday night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. The 77-year-old Democratic lawmaker was surrounded by family members at his home in the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.
Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths — more than double the number that occur in an average flu season, according to an estimate from a presidential panel released Monday.
A leading House Democrat on Monday said Democrats are prepared to pass healthcare reform without Republican support, echoing comments made over the weekend by a leading Senate Democrat.
Possibly the biggest issue—the biggest real issue, that is—standing in the way of movement forward on health reform has been how to finance a plan. That’s not particularly surprising. It’s always been expected that generating tax revenues and savings in Medicare and Medicaid to offset the new costs associated with expanding insurance coverage would be difficult and controversial.
Through most of the summer, opposition to President Obama and his health-care initiative has come almost entirely from the right. In the past week, however, the president has been trying to tamp down a noisy uprising on the left.
Will President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have to greatly scale back their health care overhaul proposals to get legislation passed this year?
House Democrats asked the nation’s biggest health insurers to provide details on executive pay, spending on entertainment, and other financial records, a move that an industry spokesman denounced as an intimidation tactic.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman
You go to a restaurant, peruse the menu, take your waiter’s suggestions, and order a meal. But there is something odd: the menu has no prices and you have no idea what you will be required to pay until a few weeks later when the bill arrives in the mail.
When politicians talk about prevention and health care, they are prone to sweeping statements about how preventive services not only keep people healthy but also save money. Just last Sunday, President Obama wrote in The Times:
