President Barack Obama's efforts to overhaul the US's healthcare system received a major fillip on Thursday when two influential organisations endorsed a reform bill that will be put to the vote in the House of Representatives on Saturday

The US House of Representatives will vote on a healthcare bill that incorporates a significant tax increase for the wealthy, senior Democrats said, as Barack Obama, president, tries to steer his most cherished reform into law

The new bill proposes to turn the NHS from what is still, broadly, a directly managed system of healthcare into something much more like a regulated industry of competing providers

At more than 1,000 pages, the healthcare bill is hard to boil down into a bumper sticker message

Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate's powerful finance committee, vowed to push through a healthcare reform bill with or without Republican support as fraught efforts to overhaul the US medical system came to a critical juncture

The White House said it was considering drawing up its own healthcare reform bill, following widespread criticism of Barack Obama's strategy of outsourcing the increasingly anarchic drafting process to Congress

Failure to pass a healthcare reform bill by the House of Representatives' Easter recess would risk a re-run of last year's 'town hall' rebellion against healthcare that almost sunk its prospects

Republican senators on the influential finance committee failed to delay Democratic attempts to pass a healthcare reform bill, saying detailed information about the cost of reform was needed before they could vote

Much like in 1994, when Bill Kristol, the conservative journalist and activist persuaded congressional Republicans to oppose healthcare reform in order to undermine the Clinton administration, many Republicans believe Barack Obama's White House would be disabled if healthcare reform were to fail

The Chance Of Tort Reform Becoming A Reality We all heard the gratuitous line concerning tort reform issued by President Obama in his speech pushing for passage of his healthcare bill. While creation of the bill in its' current form has been extremely partisan in nature, the President made this statement as an apparent "overture" to the Republican Party. There is little doubt that frivolous l...