Word: deficit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bring medicine into the 21st century, comparative effectiveness studies to identify unnecessary treatments, revamped incentives to reward quality rather than volume of care - would take more than a decade to start slashing costs, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn't score bills for their impact on the federal deficit that far in advance. Obama's most prominent game changer - an independent panel to set Medicare reimbursement policies removed from political pressures - did not fare well under the conservative CBO scoring system either. The only proposal that really impressed the CBO was the so-called public option, which would pressure...
...according to R.L. Polk & Co.--but this time they went scrap-happy. In just over a week, the program ran through most of its $1 billion in funding. The House of Representatives quickly voted to allot an additional $2 billion. In the Senate, opposition from John McCain and other deficit hawks slowed passage but appeared unlikely to stop it. "I always thought that cash for clunkers would be an effective stimulus, but it seems to have exceeded expectations," says Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, an early booster of the idea. "It would be a shame to cut it off here...
...highest since 1983. The U.S.'s much ballyhooed stimulus plan has so far yielded little measurable benefit, save putting some spark back in stock markets. The absence of real signs of recovery has Washington discussing the possibility of yet another round of stimulus spending, despite a ballooning federal budget deficit...
...pass these days: things that have to pass, like budgets - and cotton-candy giveaways, like tax cuts or the wildly irresponsible, unfunded Medicare drug bill that George W. Bush enacted. Occasionally, responsible actions take place in the budget process. Bill Clinton spent most of his political capital on deficit reduction, which helped fuel the economic boom of the 1990s. Obama has just managed to kill the F-22, an anachronistic fighter jet. Very, very occasionally a special interest will take it on the chin - as the teachers' unions did when Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated...
...that would show which treatments were effective and which were wasteful; a payment system that would give health-care providers incentives to focus on the quality rather than the quantity of care. And Obama has laid down a marker that any bill that passes must not add to the deficit over the next 10 years. "Eighty percent of all the various bills that are out there, that people have agreed to, reflect most of our ideas from the start of this process," he says...