Almost everyone agrees that the elderly need insurance coverage for prescription drugs. However, a growing number of health policy analysts believe that solving the problem of prescription drugs requires wholesale reform of Medicare. And fundamental Medicare reform may take a year or more to complete.
For the third time, Congress may pass a bill to expand educational opportunities for the children of middle- and lower-income families. The Affordable Education Act (S. 1134) being considered by Congress would expand Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) in a number of ways, including allowing them to be used for expenses from kindergarten through the 12th grade.
At President Clinton's direction, the Department of Labor has published a proposed regulation that would allow states to pay unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to fathers and mothers who take time off for the birth or adoption of a child.
If the United States were to adopt the Canadian single–payer system of financing health care as some advocate, the change would not solve many of the problems attributed to the present system. Rather, it would replace one set of problems with another. According to a survey sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health, which measured public opinion toward health care in five English–speaking countries, people in all five countries had roughly the same level of discontent with their system.
When James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute, testified before the Senate in 1988 that he was "99 percent" certain that human-caused greenhouse gases were changing the climate, Sen. (now Vice President) Al Gore took Hansen's argument seriously. In his book Earth in the Balance, Gore argued that human-caused global warming is the greatest threat facing civilization. In addition, the September 7th Washington Times reported that at Gore's 51st birthday party in 1999, he said his home state of Tennessee had warmed substantially since he was born. To prevent global warming, Gore advocates that the U.S. ratify a treaty that would reduce energy use and economic growth.
As everyone "knows," the Patients' Bill of Rights that recently passed the House of Representatives would allow members of Health Maintenance Organizations to sue their plans. What most people probably don't know is that members already can sue their HMOs under current law. So what's going on?
Former Sen. Bill Bradley is the first credible presidential candidate to call for abolishing Medicaid and allowing low-income families to buy private insurance instead. He would also end the discriminatory practice of denying tax relief to those who buy their own insurance by creating tax credits for low-income purchasers and tax deductions for everyone else.
Vice President Al Gore's new health care reform plan proposes a major step toward eliminating severe inequities in the tax law and giving needed relief to the millions of people who must buy their own health insurance or go without.
Political support is growing in Congress for another increase in the federal minimum wage. Bills now under consideration would raise the minimum hourly wage by $1, from $5.15 to $6.15, in two steps over the next year and a half. According to the Economic Policy Institute, about 11.8 million workers would be affected by a minimum wage increase. Although many of these are teen-agers and part-timers, almost one million are single mothers.
City officials and planners from all over the world are traveling to Portland, Ore., for a first hand look at the municipal pioneer of Smart Growth (also known as the New Urbanism), the latest fad in urban planning. Smart Growth promises less congestion, less air pollution, reduced infrastructure costs, more affordable housing and protection of open space through six basic policies…
Policy makers often rely on scientific research, much of which is funded by the federal government, in making important policy decisions. Faulty research can result in bad policy.
Almost daily, left-wing organizations – Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are two of the most prominent – have been publishing attacks on the House and Senate tax bills. Their analyses are often recycled in White House and Treasury Department statements and repeated by liberal reporters. The gist of the attacks can be summarized briefly: the tax cuts are nothing but give-aways to the rich.
President Clinton has proposed a new prescription drug entitlement for people on Medicare, the program covering 39 million seniors and the disabled. However, the plan has significant problems.
Politicians in both major parties now recognize that the existing Social Security system is unsustainable and must be reformed. The following are five principles that should govern our thinking about reform.
In 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, testified before the Senate that based on computer models and temperature measurements he was "99 percent sure . . the [human caused] greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."
The Clinton/Gore administration negotiated a treaty in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, that would require the United States and most other industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to slow global warming. The U.S. committed to reducing its annual greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from fossil fuel use, by about 40 percent – to 7 percent below its 1990 level – between 2008 and 2012.
In 1996 Congress passed "mental health parity" legislation that required employers who had more than 50 employees and who included mental health coverage in their health insurance benefits to offer the same annual and lifetime benefits for mental health care as for standard health care such as surgery and physician visits. The law went into effect in 1998.
Social Security is not just a retirement system; it is social insurance that also provides disability income for individuals who are injured and cannot work, as well as a death benefit and survivors benefits for widows and widowers age 60 or older and children under age 18.
President Clinton has outlined a new prescription drug entitlement for people on Medicare, the federal health insurance program covering 39 million seniors and the disabled.
In 1996 Congress created a demonstration project permitting small employers and the self-employed to establish tax-free Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs). However, congressional lawmakers imposed strict limits on who can purchase MSAs and undermined their ability to work properly.
In the emotional aftermath of recent school shootings, the Clinton Administration and Congress want to "do something" about these extremely rare events, even though preventing them is beyond the power of the federal government. The U.S. Senate passed S. 254, the Juvenile Accountability Act, last month and the House will consider similar legislation in June. The 648-page Senate bill includes a range of provisions, among them new controls on firearms. However, none of the proposed rules would have prevented the massacre in Colorado or any other past school shooting, nor would they do anything to prevent future incidents. Here is a look at some of the provisions.
Introduction The debate over Social Security reform has evolved significantly over the past few years – and especially the past few months. Almost everyone agrees that Social Security is in financial trouble. Both Republicans and Democrats have been looking for solutions and evaluating reform options, leading to a whole new vocabulary of reform.
Congress appears likely to raise the minimum wage again this year, probably from $5.15 per hour to $6.15 over three years. This will be the second minimum wage increase passed by the Republican Congress. The last increase was enacted in 1996, raising the minimum wage from $4.25 to $4.75 on October 1, 1996, and to the present $5.15 per hour on September 1, 1997.
The debate over Social Security reform has for the most part ignored the inequities in how the system treats families. These inequities derive from the adjustments that Social Security makes to benefits where spouses, survivors and divorced former partners of workers are involved.
Before a bank can merge with another bank – or even open a new branch – it must get permission from federal regulators. And in giving that permission, regulators are obliged by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), to consider whether the lender has served the entire community, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.