Word: kickbacks
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...second bill passed by the House late Sunday will make adjustments to the legislation, such as lowering the impact of an excise tax on high-value insurance plans and stripping out some sweetheart deals like the now infamous cornhusker kickback, using a process known as budget reconciliation. Such changes would be filibuster-proof in the Senate, though that process could still drag on a while if Republicans choose to draw it out with objections and amendments. Even so, it will be an anticlimax to Sunday's historic House vote, which will send the underlying Senate bill to President Obama...
...Since August, he's had to deal with "death panels," the "cornhusker kickback" and daily proclamations of a "government takeover" of health care. He has watched Obama's approval rating fall from the high 60s to the high 40s, while opposition to Democratic health care reforms have inched above 50% in many polls. Recently, he's even had Republican leaders declare that Democratic hopes for the November elections will collapse if health care reform becomes law. "Do you really think the Republicans are out there trying to save Democrats from themselves?" he asks. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...their allies seek the final cache of votes required to clear the next hurdle in the House, they have one hand tied behind them. Business-as-usual eleventh-hour incentives are off limits after the pointed backlash against a spate of clumsy sweetheart deals like the so-called Cornhusker Kickback given to Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. That's why the reality for the Democratic Party - that they must all hang together on the health care vote or they will surely all be hung separately in the midterm elections - is at the center of the case the President is now making...
Dodd is right that he can't try to shimmy past a filibuster in an election year by cobbling together 59 Democrats and a Republican; it's probably hopeless, and certainly hopeless without cutting unsavory deals like the toxic Cornhusker Kickback on health care. But weakening the bill won't get him to 60 either; it will just alienate Democrats committed to reform in the House as well as the Senate, while most Republicans will still find some reason to oppose...
...guarantee that the Senate will actually follow through on its promise to make changes to its original measure. Among those: scaling back the so-called Cadillac tax on very expensive health care policies and stripping the bill of sweetheart deals for individual Senators, such as the now infamous "Cornhusker kickback" that Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson arranged to exempt his state from having to pay additional costs for expanding Medicaid. One possibility under discussion would have at least 51 Senators signing a letter promising to uphold their end of the bargain. (Watch TIME's video "Uninsured Again...