The drug bill.

The Drug Control Bill

How beneficiaries fare under the new Medicare drug bill.

The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) provides the largest benefit expansion in Medicare's history while enacting major changes to the program's structure. Offering $410 billion in new drug benefits will certainly help many beneficiaries now struggling with the costs of prescriptions, particularly those with low incomes. It is difficult to determine, however, wh...

The Senate Bill

As the crafting of new legislation becomes a drawn-out process, compromises eventually e m e rge, and the resulting proposals often appear to be portions of various proposals spliced together. Such is the case with a farm bill proposal approved Sept. 28 in the Senate Committee on A g r i c u l t u re, Nutrition, and Forestry. As of this writing, the specific language of the bill was being devel...

Footing the bill.

When the discussion turns to the creation of a European Research Council (ERC), a series of questions spring to mind. Answering some of them is now almost trivial—for example, “Why is an ERC needed and timely?”— whereas the answers to others, being more political, are certainly more difficult to envisage for most practising scientists. This is notably the case for the questions: “Who will be th...

The Mental Treatment Bill

The Mental Treatment Bill was introduced into the House of Lords on November 19th, 1929, and was read a third time in that House and the first time in the House of Commons before the Christmas holidays. The Government may be congratulated on the promptitude with which it has directed its attention to this matter and still more on the broadminded attitude which it has adopted in translating the ...