Word: optionally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This whole vampires-vs.-zombies debate - about which monster is more vital to the pop-culture zeitgeist - has lately escalated to nuclear proportions. Both sides have gotten shriller and more dogmatic, as if they were wrangling over a public option in health-care reform or whether it's O.K. to tweet during sex. As someone who's amped up the decibel level on the creature-features subject (see my review of Thirst), I now believe the warring parties need to find some small patch of common ground. So can we agree on just one thing? A vampire movie (or novel...
...most likely way that a public option could end up part of the finished product is as a backup plan. Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, who has been publicly courted by the White House as the most probable member of her party who might vote for reform, has offered an amendment that calls for a public option to kick in down the line only if private insurers don't do enough to offer affordable health-insurance choices. According to the text of her amendment, a public option would be offered if at least two private insurers didn't offer plans that...
...some health-policy experts, this so-called trigger plan would be offered state by state rather than on a nationwide basis. If insurers were determined not to offer an affordable choice in a given state, they would still have a second chance to meet affordability standards before the public option would kick in. Snowe, in her amendment, refers to the public option as a "safety net" plan, without specifying whether such a plan would have to meet the minimum standards for adequate insurance coverage defined elsewhere in health-reform legislation. She also does not specify what entity would evaluate affordability...
...House, where many conservative Blue Dog Democrats have said they will not vote for a bill that contains a public option, wrangling over the proposal is not quite so public. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in the process of merging bills from the three committees there with jurisdiction over health care, and the design of the public plan is one of the sticking points. The original version of the House bill contained a public option that would have set its reimbursement rates above, but still tied to, Medicare rates. But an amendment that passed in the House Energy Committee would...
...Administration may have little option but to play the diplomatic game, because its "or else" options are so limited. Russia and China remain deeply skeptical of the case for sanctions and are unlikely to approve measures with significant bite. What's more, Israeli and American hawks have long argued that no sanctions will prompt a regime that has invested so much in developing a nuclear program to simply reverse course; rather, they see the choices as boiling down to one between military strikes and accepting a nuclear-armed Iran. But military strikes are opposed by the Pentagon for two reasons...