Watch this showdown in the Senate. They're bringing in the big guns.
The AP reports that "A Senate vote on a deficit-reduction bill looks to be so tight that Vice President Dick Cheney was rushing home from an overseas diplomatic mission to be the tiebreaker for saving one of the Bush administration's top priorities."
The AP further reports that "drug companies won a last-minute break against cuts to their Medicaid payments at the expense of beneficiaries, who face higher co-payments that advocates for the poor say will drive people out of the program. Regional health insurance companies, another powerful lobby, stopped a Senate bid to cut a subsidy fund designed to entice them into the Medicare market."
AARP chief William Novelli said, "It protects the pharmaceutical industry, the managed care industry and other providers at the expense of low-income Medicaid beneficiaries and Medicare beneficiaries who will foot the bill."
Posted by schwitz at December 20, 2005 09:40 AM | TrackBack