Word: healthfulness
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...union pensions at GM, Chrysler and Ford appear safe. But starting in January 2010, the union will become partially responsible for the VEBA, which now oversees and funds retiree health care. The resources devoted to the VEBA have been badly depleted by the bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler, creating doubts about how long they can sustain current benefit levels. The danger is that with thousand of union members retiring early in the past three years, the $21 billion in VEBA assets could be drained before the retirees qualify for Medicare...
...proposal to slap a 5% tax on wrinkle fillers, Botox shots, breast implants and other elective cosmetic medical procedures as 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...
...multiple crises for the U.S. Even his critics must acknowledge that. He has not sidled up to the issues facing the country but has confronted them directly - pumping billions into an economy in free fall, putting 50,000 more troops in Afghanistan, pushing toward a universal system of health insurance, beginning the fight against climate change, reactivating government regulatory agencies, transforming America's image abroad from arrogant bellicosity to comity. And he has done it all in a dignified and thoughtful fashion. Bestowing a Teddy Award - this column's annual attempt to celebrate political courage - on President Obama...
...speechwriter, who coined the phrase "axis of evil" - honored his intellectual principles by standing up against the radical excesses of his party's demagogues. Let's hope that other honorable conservatives rise to join Frum and Graham in rebuilding an intellectually supple and civil, and essential, Republican Party. (No health care reform Teddys will be issued until the final vote, although Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon certainly deserves one for his bipartisan efforts over the years, the most creative work on health reform that I've seen.) (See TIME's "Making of America" cover story on Teddy Roosevelt...