house of reps

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.

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 [...]

Rep. Bart Stupak, the adamantly anti-abortion Michigan Democrat, has stirred up a firestorm with his amendment prohibiting abortion coverage under insurance plans targeting low- and middle-income women on the exchange. And he isn’t backing down.
In an interview with Detroit News, the 57-year-old Catholic warned that “the other side is playing with fire,” if they try [...]

The Hill reports:
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-abortion rights lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from subsidizing abortions.
“I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that [...]

House Democratic leaders might have thought they dodged a bullet on Saturday when they agreed to appease moderate Dems with an amendment to restrict abortion coverage — a provision that allowed the bill to pass by a very slim 220 to 215 margin. One day later, however, liberal Democrats vowed to sink the bill if [...]

After roughly 12 hours of debate — and no absence of GOP stalling — the House late last night passed an $894 billion proposal that would forever change the way the nation’s health care system operates. The vote was 220 to 215 in the lower chamber, where only a simple majority is required to pass [...]