It may not officially be part of his job anymore, but Senator Chuck Schumer, 58, is still very much focused on elections. The architect of the Democrat's 60-seat super-majority, who helped the party add a total of 14 seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections, is worried these days about how disappointed the Democratic base will be if Congress doesn't make a determined effort to pass health care reform with a public plan in it. Odds are good that ...

Broadening the number of health care professionals who can administer vaccine, New York Gov. David Paterson issued a sweeping executive order Thursday officially declaring a state of emergency due to the increase in H1N1 cases, including 75 H1N1-related deaths in New York state.

For all the encouragement that Republicans took from the angry health-care town halls of August, the fall has not been kind to the GOP. A Washington Post-ABC poll found that only 1 in 5 voters now identifies as Republican. And the "Party of No" label might be starting to stick: a recent CNN poll found that GOP favorability has slipped to its lowest point in a decade — just 36% . Former Republican heavyweights such as Bob Dole and ...

Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Tuesday he will oppose final approval of any health care bill that has a government-run public health insurance option.Individual states would have until 2014 to decide whether they wanted to opt out, according to Reid, a Nevada Democrat facing tough re-election prospects next year. Opting out would require action by state legislatures, two Democratic sources told CNN on Tuesday. If the state's governor vetoed the bill, the legislature could still enact it by overriding the ...

Correction Appended: Oct. 19, 2009 It's hard to feel sorry for America's family doctors. Any job that averages $179,000 per year and lets you be your own boss is a job most folks wouldn't turn down. With the effort to rein in health-care costs increasingly framed as an unhappy trade-off in which insurers either slash benefits or raise premiums, some in Washington are beginning to ask a question long considered off-limits: Do we simply pay doctors too much The ...

There is candid frustration Thursday coming from rank and file congressional Democrats about the influence of Maine's Republican senator in the health care reform debate. The way Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe sees it, she's just using the power any senator has: the power of one. "The brilliance of our Founding Fathers was this: that they gave power equally to every member of the United States Senate, whether you represented a large state or a small state, and exercising that authority ...

With the passage of health-care-reform legislation out of the Senate Finance Committee expected on Tuesday, the debate moves into a new and delicate stage. It is one that will test the legislative and political skills of Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a scale that no congressional leadership team has had to face in at least four decades. Whether they are up to the challenge will determine not only the fate of the ...

The Senate Finance Committee completed debate on proposed health care legislation early Friday. The Finance Committee was the last congressional panel to consider a health care reform bill. It finished its work at 2:18 a.m. and plans to vote next week, after the bill's final language has been made public and the Congressional Budget Office has provided final cost figures. Unlike several health care reform proposals championed by House Democrats, the version that emerged from the Senate Finance Committee does ...

As lawmakers huddled this summer to put together the framework for health care legislation, it quickly became evident that the battle over President Obama's top priority would be neither quick nor easy. After months of debate and missed deadlines, the public option has emerged as the main sticking point. From the beginning, some Democrats said they wouldn't pass a bill without a government-sponsored, public option, while other Democrats and most Republicans said they'd say no to any plan ...

Way back in January, Barack Obama asked his health-care advisers for a simple number. "I want to know how clearly and how unequivocally I can tell the American people their costs are going down when this is done," he said, according to someone at the meeting. During the campaign, Obama had promised to "lower health-care costs by $2,500 for the typical family," helping him make the sale on Election Day; the question, he knew, was going to be whether ...