Word: plan
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...increasingly partisan political climate and are highly courted by other Democrats who need their votes to pass bills. Blue Dogs voted in favor of a number of Bush-era proposals, including the war in Iraq and warrantless wiretapping. They forced Obama to institute a pay-as-you-go budget plan for his $787 billion stimulus bill, recently delayed the Waxman-Markey climate-change energy bill and blocked legislation that would benefit unions. And now seven of the eight Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have threatened to vote down Obama's health-care legislation...
...About two-thirds of nonelderly Americans get health insurance through their employers, and despite the fact that the tax break is regressive - the more expensive your employer's health-insurance plan, the bigger the break you get - very few of them would look kindly on reforming the system. With that in mind, some lawmakers have proposed capping the amount of employer-sponsored health insurance that could be provided tax-free - leaving only workers with pricey, so-called Cadillac health plans worth north of $25,000 a year subject to new taxation. But even this isn't exactly guaranteed to have...
...taxing insurance companies? That's a little easier to sell to voters, which helps explain why the powerful Senate Finance Committee has reportedly pivoted from taxing workers to embracing a plan to tax the insurers who offer the most expensive health-insurance plans. Doing so would generate some tax revenue - though far less than the $1 trillion-plus over 10 years that could be generated by eliminating the tax-benefit break entirely - and possibly help "bend the curve" (to borrow the wonky slogan du jour) of rising health-care costs. The theory is that high-end insurance that covers everything...
...home to hear what constituents have to say. As President Lyndon Johnson, the great master of the Senate, warned his staff after his 1964 landslide, "every day while I'm in office, I'm gonna lose votes." Some 56% of Americans believe that Obama can implement a national health plan in the next four years, but that's down from 63% six months ago, and the percentage of doubters has risen from 31% to 39% in that same period, according to a July 22 Associated Press poll. Simply missing the deadline adds to the perception that health-care reform...
...Personal Touch From the beginning, President Obama has taken almost the exact opposite route than that taken by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The Clinton health-care plan was written in secret, without input from Congress, before the Administration tried to ram it down the throat of the legislative branch. The catastrophic failure of that strategy is still burned into the minds of many former Clinton staffers, including Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel...