Medicare conferees might want a snickers. (Medicare Rx).

Publication: Medicine & Health

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2003 Thomson Financial Inc.

At a July 1 forum organized by the non-partisan Alliance for Health Reform, Patrick Morrisey, House Energy and Commerce Committee GOP deputy staff director, not surprisingly said the Senate should move towards the House bill in the Medicare conference committee currently forming. Elizabeth Fowler, chief health and entitlements counsel for Senate Finance Committee Democrats, predictably said the opposite, as did William Hoagland, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-TN) director of budget and appropriations.

But there was one thing all three staffers agreed on regarding conference deliberations: The answer to that perennial Capitol Hill question--Will it be done before the August recess?--is almost surely no. Getting the legislation right...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.