Word: bille
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...will take relentless focus to sell health reform and solve the continuing economic crisis. That will not leave much time for climate change, at least not this year - and that is a good thing, because the Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House is an excellent candidate for euthanasia. It is a demonstration of all that's wrong with the legislative process in latter-day America. There is a simple solution to this problem: a carbon tax to discourage people from using fossil fuels. That tax could be immediately refunded in the form of lower payroll taxes...
...That's the question that many of their allies are asking more and more, as the drive for health-care reform enters a make-or-break month with new signs of problems ahead. The party's liberal base is increasingly insistent that the bill include a strong, government-run public option, like a program similar to Medicare that would serve as an alternative to private insurers. Republicans are calling it a deal killer, which means any bill with a strong government-financed option would necessarily have to go forward without any significant GOP support. But diluting the bill too much...
...before conveyed to Baucus he would have trouble getting his fellow Democrats to vote for taxing health benefits - told the Republicans that the time for posturing was over. It was now time, he stressed, to make clear whether they intended to be part of the process of writing a bill or simply oppose it. "The message was, 'Are you in or are you out?' " Manley said. But where Reid may have thought he was drawing a line in the sand, GOP Senators took away the opposite message - saying they saw signs that the majority leader might be flexible...
...Democrats will have to decide in the coming weeks whether they are willing to go it alone on health reform or whether they will continue to negotiate with Republicans for a bill that would likely be less expensive and contain far less of a role for government in the health-care system. The chief tool Democrats have for ramming through a bill on their own is something known, incongruously enough, as "reconciliation." It is a parliamentary procedure that protects budget-related measures from a filibuster. (There's yet another possibility: Reid might put the pressure on his own caucus...
...Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota noted in an interview that passing health-care reform under the reconciliation rule poses as many problems as it solves for the Democrats and for health reform. Any bill that passes under the reconciliation process must be deemed by the Congressional Budget Office to pay for itself in the next six years. (By comparison, a bill that passes under regular procedures has an 11-year window.) As a result of that tighter fiscal constraint, Conrad said, any bill that passes under reconciliation would likely provide "dramatically less health reform...