Word: plan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...told he had stomach cancer. It was then that he found himself launched upon a three-year ordeal of battling not just the disease that would ultimately kill him but also Aetna U.S. Health Care, the nation's largest health insurer. As required, he first approached doctors in his plan. Conceding that they didn't have the expertise to treat his rare form of cancer, leiomyosarcoma, they referred him to specialists outside the plan. He bounced back and forth between clinics and Aetna bureaucrats who challenged his use of out-of-plan doctors and "experimental" treatments such as the high...
When Representative Charlie Norwood, a Georgia Republican, introduced a bill last year that would have opened the door to HMO malpractice suits, the American Association of Health Plans quickly parried with a study by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick predicting that the resulting torrent of suits would pump up premiums as much as 8.6%--a claim that lost some currency when, in a similar study, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that costs would rise only 1.2%, a mere $7 per covered employee per year. House Republicans, led by Dennis Hastert of Illinois, now Speaker, opposed the plan largely...
...Clinton plan would consecrate most of the budget surplus over the next 15 years to Social Security, delaying its collapse from 2032 to 2055. For the first time the plan would also allow 15% of the fund to be invested in the stock market, so that some of our Social Security dollars could earn as much as those in our mutual funds. (Now invested in Treasury bonds, the money earns from 4% to 5% a year--only a bit better than shoving it under a mattress...
Clinton got the public applause he wanted: in a TIME/CNN poll last week, 61% of those surveyed said they agree with dedicating all or most of next year's surplus money to Social Security, vs. 31% who think it should be used to lower taxes. But Clinton's plan also absorbed the expected blows. Though the minority leaders in both houses endorsed the plan, other Democrats think even microscopic tinkering with the party's hallowed invention--let alone Clinton's fairly substantial changes--would be unacceptable. Many Republicans--who want to use much of the surplus for tax cuts...
...most battered part of the plan was the stock-market idea. Corporations hated it. Members of Congress in both parties hated it. And, most important, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan--the patron saint of our prosperity--hated it. "I do not believe that it is politically feasible to insulate such huge funds from government direction," he said. That's Greenspanese for a simple concern: by investing some $700 billion in Social Security funds, the government-cum-shareholder would inject politics into the free market and unduly influence corporate decision-making. Would the government, for example, bring an antitrust or discrimination...