Word: bille
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...practically for major emitters. Jackson said she did not have a timetable for when the agency would publish a detailed plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and both Jackson and Obama have said repeatedly that they would prefer legislative action - in the form of a carbon cap-and-trade bill - over top-down regulation. The House has already passed a bill that would cap U.S. carbon emissions at 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, and the Senate is considering similar legislation. The threat of EPA regulation might be enough to nudge the Senate in the right direction. "We still need...
...While the legislation would give the Health and Human Services Secretary more authority than she has now to put some pilot programs into effect, the Senate is already putting the brakes on some of the more innovative ideas. Under its version of the bill, three of the pilot programs that have the most potential to transform health care would require congressional approval before the Secretary could apply them to Medicare nationally. The first is known as "accountable care organizations," an arrangement in which hospitals, primary-care doctors and potentially other medical professionals would have to coordinate care for their shared...
...Even more damaging in the view of many reformers is a little-noticed deal that Senate majority leader Harry Reid cut to get the support he needed to bring the bill to the floor of his chamber. The original Finance Committee bill would have triggered the commission's recommendations whenever the rate of increase in Medicare spending outpaced overall economic growth - something that happens almost every year. But the current version would allow it to make recommendations only when Medicare spending per capita grows faster than overall health costs. That almost never occurs. The change in economic measuring sounds technical...
...Congresswoman Barbara Kennelly, who runs the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, a powerful senior-citizens advocacy group. "We don't think there ought to be a commission at all - period," says Maria Freese, the organization's director of government relations. "This is not supposed to be a bill that shrinks Medicare." Administration officials are working to get the teeth restored to the commission idea - "We've got to have it," says an official - but that will be a huge challenge. The White House will need to find 60 Senate votes to reinsert the provision and faces another...
...combat such perceived persecution, Berlusconi has tested the bounds of decorous democratic conduct, including his allies' pushing a bill through Parliament last year that gave him and other top Italian officeholders immunity from prosecution. But since the Constitutional Court overturned that law in October, several criminal investigations into Berlusconi's business dealings have been reopened, with other new charges rumored to be looming...