Suzy Khimm

I’ve had a great time guest-blogging here at TAPPED, amid all the health-care and election madness last week. Many thanks again to the editors for bringing me on board — and to the TAPPED readership for your attention. But our wonktastic journey doesn’t have to end here. Visit me back at The New Republic, where […]

As Ezra noted earlier this week, much of the reason that American health care is so expensive is because we pay so much per-unit of care, whether it’s a prescription or a CT scan. In order to insure health care remains affordable and that reform is sustainable in the long term, these costs need to […]

Should illegal immigrants be able to purchase private health insurance within the newly created federal exchanges if they use their own money? That question, as I noted yesterday, is one of the biggest sticking points in the fight about immigration in the health-care bill. The Senate supports such a prohibition, while the House hasn’t done […]

Today the AARP and American Cancer Society endorsed the House health-care bill, with the American Medical Association expressing its positive (if qualified support). But amid this big news, a strong message of dissent was sent to the Senate side of things — and it didn’t come from Bachmann‘s tea-party spectacular on Capitol Hill. In a […]

The House may be closer to settling the immigration issues in the health-care bill this week, but the issue is sure to rear its head again further down the road in the legislative process. In the manager’s amendment to the bill released Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House would not adopt the stricter […]

Over at Newsweek, Ben Adler describes how the Republican upsets in New York City’s suburbs are “an actual bad sign for the Democrats.” I’d actually look a bit farther east to include the results in Connecticut as another reason for concern. Republicans ousted Democrats in municipal elections throughout the state, picking up seats in Stratford, […]

House leadership is still struggling to find a compromise on abortion provisions that could threaten to derail the health-care bill, which they are trying to bring to a vote as early as this weekend. Yesterday, Indiana Rep. Brad Ellsworth, an anti-abortion Democrat, put out his own amendment to try to break the legislative deadlock. While […]

Medicare and Medicaid aren’t the only public insurance programs that could undergo a major overhaul under the current health-care reform bill. Over at The Washington Independent, Mike Lillis explains how the House bill proposes to eliminate CHIP — the state children’s health-insurance program that has enjoyed broad-based support from Democrats — and move the low-income […]

Are lobbyists really fleeing Obama’s Washington? Yesterday, the Center for Responsive Politics and OMB Watch jointly released a study revealing that some 1,400 lobbyists de-registered between April and June this year — about 8 percent of the total number of registered lobbyists. Normally, only a few hundred lobbyists leave every quarter, but the exodus happened […]