Health and Human Services

Both the House and Senate health reform proposals would force insurance plans to follow the recommendations as part of a minimum swath of services.

Following up on Daphne’s piece about the hold-up on Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head the Office of Legal Counsel, this Roll Call story by Jessica Brady got published on Saturday, so it hasn’t received much attention. It should. Regina Benjamin, the president’s nominee for surgeon general, is being kept out of her job because of [...]

It’s no news that Republicans are up in arms over the recent White House decision to bar insurance companies from encouraging their customers to oppose the Democrats’ health reform plans. But today they upped the ante.
In a letter to the White House, Republican leaders have threatened to block confirmation of 10 White House nominees to [...]

So do they or don’t they?
Yesterday, President Obama stood before the nation’s largest doctors’ group and made his strongest case yet for the creation of a government-backed insurance plan to compete with private companies. Such an option is necessary, Obama told members of the American Medical Association, “[to] force waste out of the system and [...]

Lost in the din over Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to switch parties today was Health and Human Services Secretary-nominee Kathleen Sebelius’ confirmation hearing. Well, she was confirmed by the Senate, by a vote of 65 to 31.

I was just talking to Wendy Wright, the president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, about the nomination of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kans.) to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The group opposes the nomination, and Wright is raising some questions about the timing of the swine flu crackdown so close [...]

As we mentioned earlier, the recent swine flu outbreak is causing some liberals to go back to the stimulus debate of earlier this year to point out that the Democrats’ push to include hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic research and mitigation funding was thwarted by Republicans, led by Sen. Susan Collins (Maine). Now [...]

Two bills introduced in Congress recently stake out rival positions on a key issue related to health care reform. Which approach ultimately prevails will help determine whether the pharmaceutical industry maintains the support that Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler voiced Wednesday for President Obama’s plan’s to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) [...]

A few big announcements from the Obama administration on the health care front today: Confirming reports over the weekend that he was set to do so, President Obama officially named Kansas’ Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his nominee for secretary of health and human services. You may recall that Sebelius’ predecessor as the HHS nominee, [...]

I’m not surprised that there’s a grassroots Website urging the selection of physician and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as the next secretary of health and human services. I’m surprised how I found out: Via a tweet by Republican Internet guru Patrick Ruffini. If Dean had won the 2004 nomination, Ruffini, as webmaster of the [...]