senate finance committee

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 [...]

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 [...]

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who last month salvaged the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the Senate’s health reform bill, just issued a statement condemning the House legislation for proposing to terminate the program.
“As health reform moves forward, we need to make sure children can keep their CHIP coverage and not be forced into untested private [...]

Few lawmakers on planet earth have pushed more persistently for health care reform in the past decade than Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). And although Wyden’s own enormous blueprint for a health system overhaul was largely ignored through this year’s debate, the Oregon Democrat has had a great deal of luck tweaking the Senate bill to [...]

Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine), the only Republican to offer the least bit of support for the Democrats’ health reform legislation this year, said Tuesday that she will vote against the Senate bill unless it’s altered, The Associated Press is reporting.

For the past month, Senate Democrats have bent over backward to get Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) behind their health reforms — a move that seemed to pay dividends when she voted earlier this month with Democrats in favor of the Senate Finance Committee’s reform proposal.
But yesterday, in the lone decision to include an “opt-out” public [...]

He’s decidedly anti-trigger. And he’s opposed to health care co-ops. But Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s health subpanel, likes what he sees in the Democrats’ plan to bring an opt-out public option to the Senate floor. In a just-released statement, he says he’s “gratified” that Senate Majority Leader Harry [...]

Not the horse.
Here’s the statement from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s health subpanel, reacting to reports that the White House is leaning toward a trigger in lieu of a strong public option in the Democrats’ health reform legislation:

During the course of the heath reform debate raging on Capitol Hill, some supporters of the public option have conceded that the very nomenclature adopted to describe the public plan — why not just say socialized medicine? — has threatened the push to create such an option to compete with private insurers.
“We’re talking about [...]

Karen Ignagni, head of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry lobby, fired back today against the charges that the industry is dead set against health care reform this year. The group has taken plenty of heat for sponsoring a report earlier this month indicating that the health reform bill recently passed by the Senate Finance [...]