Congress

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.

As Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) celebrates his milestone today — he has served in the House and Senate longer than anyone else, ever — let’s take a moment to remember his work with the fiddle.

As lawmakers start to shift their attention to job creation, a Brandeis University study finds that four in 10 families don’t have enough savings or assets on hand to pay for essential expenses during a period of unemployment. The report also notes that the poor economy is hitting minority households particularly hard, erasing their economic [...]

The push is on to dilute the climate change bills moving through Congress, and it’s not coming only from conservatives. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports today that 14 Senate Democrats are urging their leadership to amend the proposal to grant more free polluting permits to the coal-burning utilities that emit the most greenhouse gases. In [...]

It’s a nonsensical element of Medicaid’s funding formula that during economic downturns, when state budgets are most squeezed, states are also asked to bear much higher health costs as the Medicaid rolls swell. The result, inevitably, is the erosion of health coverage for the country’s most vulnerable populations.
The $787 billion economic stimulus bill addressed the [...]

Doug Hoffman, he failed Conservative Party candidate in the NY-23 special election is clearly relishing the surprise twist in his election – errors in the count that have put him only around 3,000 votes behind his opponent, Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), with around 6,000 absentee ballots outstanding. He appeared on Fox News last week to [...]

Health policy experts warn the Democrats’ proposal to terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program would hike health care costs for low-income families and increase the number of uninsured kids.

In January of 2008, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). CREW wondered if a $2 million earmark Landrieu had showered on a children’s literacy company wasn’t inspired by a $30,000 fundraiser the company had held for the senator days earlier.
Twenty-two months [...]

Here’s Sen. Charles Grasssley (R-Iowa) in June, telling Fox News that requiring people to buy health insurance is a good idea, analogous to states requiring drivers to purchase car insurance:
There isn’t anything wrong with it, except some people look at it as an infringement upon individual freedom. But when it comes to states requiring it [...]

Customers will have to opt-in to overdraft protection programs before banks can charge them overdraft fees on debit purchases and ATM withdrawals, according to new finance rules rolled out by the Federal Reserve today. The move marks a sharp departure from current practice, in which many banks silently and automatically enroll their customers into overdraft [...]