Tag: Medicare

Congressional Democrats on Sunday passed historic legislation to extend health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, protect patients from the most flagrant abuses of insurance companies, and curb runaway health care costs. All told, the $940 billion reforms represent the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system since the creation of Medicare more than four decades ago.

It has been a week since Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, aghast with the shenanigans on Capitol Hill, took matters into his own...

WASHINGTON-- Senate Democrats on Thursday approved the best health care reform bill they could manage: a sweeping $871 billion proposal designed to extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and slow the growth of runaway costs. It was at once a monumental achievement, which if signed into law would represent the most expansive overhaul of the nation’s dysfunctional health care system in generations, and a disappointment to many liberals who’d hoped the reforms would go further to rein in the medical-services industries most responsible for the skyrocketing expenses.

Democratic leaders face a major decision now on health care reform-- yet another one this year that will throw into relief the interests that compete in American representative democracy. They have to choose between either closing the "doughnut hole" and offering full coverage for millions of low-income seniors on Medicare who need to buy prescription drugs or sticking to a deal they made with the nation's major drug companies. According to the deal, the government agrees not to use its bulk buying power to lower the cost of drugs, so long as the drug companies dole out $80 billion over the next decade to subsidize health reform.

Today, some of the women of the U.S. Senate took to the chamber floor and made their case for health reform. Maryland Democrat Barbara...

Republican leaders in the Senate on Monday asked the top actuary at the Health and Human Services Department for a cost analysis of the Democrats’ health-care reform proposal. That would be exactly as dry as it sounds except for this: the actuary, Richard Foster, is the very same official muzzled by the Bush administration in 2003 when Democrats asked for a similar examination of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit — an unfunded initiative that Republicans rammed through Congress in order to solidify the seniors’ vote in the run-up to the 2004 elections.

With Democratic leaders hoping to bring up legislation to fix, once and for all, the formula to pay doctors who treat Medicare patients, a...

With the nation’s insurers having dropped their support for the health reforms moving through Congress, Senate Democrats are taking daring steps to rally the backing of another powerful medical lobby: doctors.

The Washington Independent wrote recently about the oddity of congressional Republicans blasting the thought of creating a public plan while at the same time...

This Research 2000/Daily Kos poll sheds light on one of the strange phenomena of the health care debate; conservatives worrying that the government will...