Day: January 17, 2009

It just doesn’t end!

Every year American consumers must pay more for their health care and pharmaceutical needs and every year health care providers and the pharmaceutical industry — with the help of our Congress — figure-out new ways to cut their costs and increase ours.

There are many ways Americans are being ‘ripped-off’. I will focus on a few ways this is occurring and how we pay more every year for our prescription medications and health care plans.

Denzel at the Four Seasons and Rep David Wu at a Capitol Hill watering hole.

House Democrats yesterday offered a more detailed analysis of a $275 billion tax-cut plan that gives two-thirds of its benefits to individual taxpayers, part of the $825 billion stimulus package they hope to send to President-elect Barack Obama before President’s Day.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said yesterday that he has decided to take a position at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies after he leaves the Treasury Department.

A plan to build a $1.2 billion, privately run wind farm off the Cape Cod shore cleared a major hurdle yesterday when the Interior Department deemed it environmentally safe.

A simple question hovers over the inauguration: Who’s in charge?

Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. won support yesterday from another Republican lawmaker, all but ensuring his candidacy will proceed smoothly and not fall to a GOP filibuster.

Congress and the incoming Obama administration are contemplating profound shifts in the government’s role in health insurance to try to alleviate a significant ripple effect of the damaged economy: Americans losing health coverage as they lose jobs.

When a train pulls out of Philadelphia today carrying President-elect Barack Obama on a symbolic journey to Washington, it will set off a four-day inaugural celebration of unprecedented ambition that has been calibrated to strike a balance between marking a moment many thought would never come an…