health care reform

TPMDC’s Brian Beutler reports that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has announced he plans to vote to send the Senate health care bill to the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has scheduled the vote for Saturday night.
“This weekend, I will vote for the motion to proceed to bring that debate onto the Senate [...]

Republicans on Capitol Hill were sure quick to go after the new federal guidelines recommending that women should seek routine mammograms beginning at age 50 instead of 40. “This is how rationing begins,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician. [...]

Nothing shocking here. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the chamber floor this morning to decry the Democrats’ $848 billion health reform bill, unveiled about 15 hours earlier.
After six weeks of drafting a bill behind closed doors, the Majority has produced a bill that increases premiums, raises taxes, and slashes Medicare by half [...]

Now that the veil has been lifted, here are a few of the important numbers surrounding the Senate’s health reform bill, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office.

$848 billion: Ten-year cost of the proposal, all of it offset by revenue increases and budget cuts elsewhere.
$130 billion: Amount the bill would reduce budget deficits over 10 years.
[...]

After weeks of number crunching, the Congressional Budget Office announced this afternoon that the Senate’s health reform bill will cost $849 billion over 10 years, cover 94 percent of the country’s population, and reduce the deficit by $127 billion, Fox News reports:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released the bill and its price tag to his colleagues [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I can’t make heads or tails of Sarah Palin’s analysis of her “death panels” remark in the lengthy, friendly Q&A she gave to National Review yesterday.

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” says Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer [...]

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

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 [...]