Word: bill
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week the Senate took a sizable step to ease the burden on the Prices and millions of other Americans by passing the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, the most dramatic expansion of federal health insurance since its enactment in 1965. That same day the House derailed a bill that would have provided home health care for the chronically ill. It was a reminder that the Federal Government, too, has difficulty paying rising medical costs...
...charged an additional $4 monthly premium plus an income-based surtax. Among the provisions to be phased in during the next three years is the cost of respite care for up to 80 hours a year, which will allow many like Anna Price to hire occasional help. But the bill has little effect on the big-ticket item for 1.5 million elderly Americans: nursing-home costs, which average $22,000 a year...
...does it cover long-term home care -- a gap that Claude Pepper, the 87- year-old champion of the elderly, tried to fill with his complementary bill. At $4.5 billion by 1990, the Pepper proposal appealed more to the heart than to reason. "This is a day for which I've waited and worked and I might say prayed for 50 years," Pepper declared in an impassioned plea to his colleagues on the day of the vote. "Think about the human values...
...before the vote, 2,000 delegates at the National Council of Senior Citizens convention in Las Vegas took turns manning phones to remind Congressmen that the council's 4.5 million members were watching. The 28 million-member American Association of Retired Persons also supported the bill. Far more effective, however, was a letter-writing campaign by one of the House's mightiest chairmen, burly Dan Rostenkowski of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. He and Chairman John Dingell of the Energy and Commerce Committee were incensed that Pepper had struck a deal to bypass their committees and take...
...tennis at the River Club, fierce games of backgammon and Scrabble at night. After Prescott Bush Sr., the imposing (6 ft. 4 in.) patriarch, arrived by sleeper car from Manhattan on the weekends, he would recruit a vocal quartet from the assembled company for after-dinner harmonizing. Family Friend Bill Truesdale describes those summers: "It's hard to imagine anything better...