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Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.
President Obama said it best during his state of the Union Address this year when he declared: 'I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don't play by the rules.'
Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don't.
Gasoline prices are soaring through the stratosphere, and the Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to be standing up for the consumer, ought to stop playing footsie with the oil companies and take steps to protect the American people.
Like any business, the oil industry runs on the basic premise of supply and demand. The more supply - the lower the price. The higher the demand - the higher price. In other words, the more people who can buy oil, the higher the price of oil.
If China is helping its domestic industries charge an artificially low price for solar panels and other environmental goods, then China is violating international trade rules that it agreed to when it became a member of the World Trade Organization.
I agree with just about everyone in the reform debate when they say 'If you like what you have, you should be able to keep it.' But the truth is that none of the health reform bills making their way through Congress actually delivers on that promise.
Right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is the ban on insurance companies discriminating against people with a pre-existing condition. And this part of the Affordable Care Act makes sure that health care is not just for the healthy and wealthy.
I agree with just about everyone in the reform debate when they say "If you like what you have, you should be able to keep it." But the truth is that none of the health reform bills making their way through Congress actually delivers on that promise.
It's time to look beyond the budget ax to assure access to health care for all. It's time to look for bipartisan solutions to the problems we can tackle today, and to work together for tomorrow - building a health care system that works for all Americans.
The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system.
Right now, there are a limited number of customers for Canadian oil. Due to simple geography - and without the pipeline - it's really only cost effective for Canadian oil producers to sell their oil to North American customers, mostly American Midwesterners.
It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.
It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.
I think if progressives stay at this, continue at the grassroots level to make the case that all Americans should have choice, all Americans ought to be able to hold insurance companies accountable, I think we will have 60 votes in the United States Senate for a strong bill.
In today's world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases.
I asked the former director James Comey about the FBI's intersections with Jeff Sessions prior to his stepping aside from the Russia investigation. Mr. Comey said his continued engagement with the Russian investigation was "problematic " and he said he could not discuss it in public.
Americans are free to choose everything from what they eat, drive and watch on TV to the President of the United States. Yet, when it comes to allowing Americans to choose the health insurance that works best for them and their family, the freedom to choose suddenly becomes un-American.
The U.S. Senate does not allow legislative provisions to be included in appropriations bills, for much the same reason that most Americans are concerned about earmarks: it creates a slippery slope by which lobbyists and special interest groups can sneak provisions into large, must-pass legislation.
Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's location history and the technology does the work for them.
Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.
In order to do vigorous oversight, the leadership of the intelligence community has got to be straight with the American people and straight with the Congress. For there to be vigorous oversight, the intelligence community's got to be straight with the American people and the Congress and that has not been the case.
Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship.
While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs.
Americans don't want to hear the answers are privileged and off limits or they can't be provided in public or it would be inappropriate for witnesses to tell us what they know. We are talking about an attack on our democratic institutions and stonewalling of any kind is unacceptable. General Jeff Sessions acknowledged that there is no legal basis for this stonewalling.
The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.
The government's collection authority, under the Patriot Act, is basically limitless. They can get the medical records and financial records, gun purchase records. And it also becomes part of another important issue that relates to the FISA court and the rest of the debate. It almost becomes a secret law, like there are two Patriot Acts. The one you read on the laptop essentially leads you to believe that there's some connection to terror .
Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across.
You essentially have a human-relations database on millions of Americans. The administration said, "Well we're not listening to calls, we don't collect content." As [Vice President] Joe Biden said when he was a United States senator, you don't need to listen to those calls. If you have who somebody called, when and where, and you learned, for example, somebody called a psychiatrist three times in the last few days and twice after midnight, you know a lot about that person that they may not want people to know about them, especially the government.