Word: billing
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Booker, a former tight end at Stanford whose hands are longer than the Jersey Shore, possesses the oratorical gifts of Obama (unlike the President, he shuns teleprompters) and the eagerness to engage that carried Bill Clinton to the top. Unlike Clinton, Booker sometimes needs to read crowds a bit better. At a community event, he dropped a reference to the television show Frasier while playing Simon Says with a few dozen African-American kids and their parents. (Frazier was the last name of one of the participants.) The kids were mystified...
Since he took office in January, President Barack Obama has made clear that he views this year as the best opportunity in decades to overhaul the nation's ailing health-care system; more recently, he has stressed that he wants the House and Senate to pass their respective bills before their monthlong August recess. That, to say the least, is not going according to plan. The Senate said on July 23 it would not make the deadline, and the House is also looking increasingly unlikely to produce a bill by then. This slows the momentum behind the President...
...weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office found that neither the bill produced in the House nor the one written by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee - Ted Kennedy's panel - would yield savings in the long run. On the contrary, Democrats on Capitol Hill are having a hard time coming up with ways to keep reform from raising the cost of health care over the next decade. This has given lots of ammunition to both Republican and fiscally conservative Democratic critics of the health-care proposals. And it puts a lot of pressure on the Senate Finance...
...Raising Revenue All this makes the $1 trillion, 10-year price tag of health reform very tricky. A good two-thirds of the bill is already paid for: $237 billion would come from fines on employers and individuals who don't comply with new rules to provide or buy health insurance; $525 billion would come from reductions in Medicare payments to private insurers and money ponied up by drug companies (as touted by Obama in a high-profile White House event); and corporate- and foreign-tax changes totaling $37.2 billion...
...Hard to believe, but money is actually only half the problem. The flip side of cutting costs is adding coverage for the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans. To that end, both the House and Senate HELP bills include a public plan that would compete with existing private plans - a highly controversial idea that Republicans say is tantamount to the socialization of health care, but which many Democrats (including Obama) say is essential for any overhaul of the system. The Senate Finance Committee's bill takes a middle-of-the-road approach, including a co-op plan, essentially a nonprofit version...