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...fact, gone may be too strong a word. The Fed, and the rest of us, are in uncharted territory. We've just been through a financial shock that was in some ways worse than the one that set off the Great Depression. The policy response from the Fed and Congress was pretty much the diametric opposite of that of the early 1930s, so the hope is that things will turn out better this time. But we just don't know...
...legislation may seem a sure bet, but anti-immigration sentiment still runs hot enough in Congress to make passage of the Nelson-McGovern bill a real challenge; and it's likely a big reason the Obama Administration, which is cautiously trying to revive immigration reform, hasn't completely done away with the widow penalty on its own yet. Conservative immigration think tanks like the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, for example, say the rule is a sensible safeguard against rampant marriage fraud, sham matrimonies between a U.S. citizen and a foreigner solely to get the latter a green card...
...Goukassian, who says she has thus far been able to get her deportation deferred, is not yet part of a suit herself. She says she feels confident that Congress will decide the widows "have the truth on our side." Still, she fears there is a culture inside the U.S. immigration bureaucracy that assumes foreign spouses are merely green-card gold diggers. (To be fair, immigration agents do confront myriad scam artists, male and female.) She and Tigran were genuinely in love, she says, because they were "Russian soul mates" - he was born in Russia and came to America...
...such couples are indeed soul mates, say widow-penalty opponents, then the immigration rule simply defies any sense of fairness. But to get the Nelson-McGovern bill through Congress, they'll probably have to convince immigration conservatives that making the death of an American spouse a reason for the deportation of a non-American spouse is downright un-American...
...past, industry lobbyists have persuaded Congress to squash even mild reimbursement reforms; former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala recalls a futile effort to reduce overpayments and promote competition among oxygen providers. "Congress stops anything that's going to gore anybody's ox," Shalala says. "If Congress is going to be involved in the nitty-gritty payment details, reform is dead." Obama wants to let another independent agency, similar to the military-base-closing commission, recommend how to pay for quality, which would limit political haggling. But even if such a panel focused on clinical effectiveness rather than cost...