Posts by Mike Lillis

The House is expected tomorrow to take up a $210 billion proposal to scrap the flawed formula that dictates Medicare doctor payments, thereby averting a 21-percent pay cut slated for next year.
If the proposal sounds familiar, it’s because the Senate considered a nearly identical bill just a month ago. That legislation was shot down, not because [...]

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) has a message for his Democratic colleagues moving forward with plans for another job creation bill: hold your horses. In an interview with MSNBC Wednesday, Clyburn said the focus for Congress now should be “to get the economy stabilized and grow the economy,” but added, “I don’t think we [...]

On Monday, The New York Times ran a damning story detailing how the nation’s drug makers are hiking their prices ahead of the reform laws winding their way through Congress. The very next day, some powerful House Democrats called for a closer look, asking the Government Accountability Office to examine the drug industry to verify [...]

Yesterday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that Congress will likely stick around Washington well into December in order to wrap up legislation reforming health care and tackling unemployment. But he didn’t go out on any limbs to say what the latter bill will contain or how much help might be forthcoming. Instead, he [...]

The firestorm continues surrounding new recommendations that women screen later in life and less frequently for breast cancer, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — herself a breast cancer survivor — blasting the advice as both dangerous and confusing to women.
“These are very disturbing recommendations,” Wasserman Schultz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday.

Neither chamber takes aim at the underlying fiscal problems of Medicaid, the state-federal partnership that covers the poorest Americans.

As we mentioned here last week, the recently passed jobless benefits extension, though packaged as a boost for Main Street, provided many times more funding to the nation’s businesses, including the largest corporations. Specifically, the law allows companies to recover already-paid taxes by applying recession-year losses to income made over the past five years. The [...]

With abortion now topic-of-the-moment amid the health reform debate, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) weighed in last night with a prediction certain to please women’s rights groups: Republicans, the Ohio Democrat said, won’t be able to rally even 50 votes — let alone the 60 they’ll need — to pass an amendment restricting abortion coverage on [...]

Women should screen for breast cancer less frequently and at a later age, according to new recommendations issued Monday by a well-respected preventative medicine panel.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force, which in 2002 recommended that women begin getting mammograms at age 40, now says 50 is the more appropriate age. The New York Times [...]

The Dow might be on the rebound, but there’s little evidence that the fortunes are trickling down to the lowest-income families in the country. Nearly 15 percent of American families had trouble putting food on the table at some point last year — the highest rate since the government began surveying hunger 14 years ago, [...]