Word: bills
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...part of President Obama's health care reform package is raising disapproving eyebrows among some groups. A coalition of plastic surgeons, a women's group, medical associations and pharmaceutical makers were distraught when Senate majority leader Harry Reid slipped the so-called Botax levy into the health care bill late last month in hopes of raising $5.8 billion over the next 10 years. The tax would apply to elective but not reconstructive plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures...
Still, Congress faces a heavy burden in searching every nook and cranny for ways to fund the health care reform bill's $849 billion price tag. Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Reid, dismisses suggestions that women are being targeted and notes that Senators are looking everywhere for ways to fund the bill. "There was a point a few weeks ago when Senator Reid needed some additional revenue for this bill - the goal was to keep all the financing within the health care arena, and in the end, he decided to include this provision in the bill," says Manley...
...Industrial action could have cost Europe's third biggest airline as much as $50 million each day had the strike gone ahead as planned on Dec. 22. That's cash - and cachet - the struggling carrier can ill-afford to lose. Tumbling first-class passenger numbers and a ballooning fuel bill left the airline with a $656 million pretax loss in the 12 months ending March 31. It lost plenty more in the first half of this year too. The airline's $6 billion pension deficit, meanwhile, is among the biggest...
...course, this is hardly the first time the Senate has tried its best to ruin good legislation. Opposition to the Social Security Act came overwhelming from the Senate Finance Committee, which did its best to turn the act into the stingy—and straight-up racist—bill that was eventually passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had to be watered down at the last minute by Senate GOP leader Everett Dirksen and then-Senators Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy ’48 in order to avoid a successful filibuster. Then, as now, the structural...
...fact that the Senate has traditionally derailed legislation that I support is, of course, not a good enough reason to abolish it. The fact that it consistently neglects the popular will, however, is. Take the example of the Social Security Act. In 1935, when the bill was being debated, Congressman Ernest Lundeen proposed a far more radical bill, in which all workers, regardless of race or industry, would be provided with generous benefits provided by taxing the incomes and estates of wealthy Americans. The American people strongly supported the Lundeen proposal, with a New York Post poll at the time...