The Senate Finance Committee’s version of the great American health-care makeover, unveiled today by Sen. Max Baucus, runs to some 200-plus pages, and if adopted in its present form — a very big if — will cost an estimated $856 billion over the next 10 years.

How would the package affect corporate taxes? more

Real quick item: Here’s a very clever WSJ article on new words hatched by the financial crisis.

For example, risk management: “n. Until recently, the process by which banks make giant bets with other people’s money before persuading someone else to take the fall. Currently known as ‘federal supervision.’”

And here’s a welcome addition — “financial globaloney” — to this new dictionary. ###

The ink was hardly dry on the April 2008 merger of business information giants Reuters Group and The Thomson Corp. when the new combined entity embarked on an aggressive campaign to beef up its Tax & Accounting business, including the acquisition of GRC heavyweight Paisley in January of this year. The spending spree continued this week with Thomson Reuters’s announcement that it plans to snap up Abacus Enterprise, a suite of tax software products, from Deloitte LLP. more

Earlier this month, a group of 28 big names from the business, legal, academic, and nonprofit world put out a paper called “Overcoming Short-Termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management.” Among the signatories, all of whom are members of The Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program, are heavyweights like John Bogle of Vanguard; Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway; Louis Gerstner Jr., formerly of IBM; and James Wolfensohn of the World Bank Group.

Short-termism “refers to the excessive focus of some corporate leaders, investors, and analysts on short-term earnings guidance, coupled with a lack of attention to the strategy, fundamentals, and conventional approaches to long-term value creation,” according to the CFA Institute. more

If you’re not a fan of Sarbanes-Oxley and oppose new cross-industry business regulations (and/or a restructured regulatory regime), you might consider thanking Wall Street and the U.S. healthcare system.

Not so long ago, the term “regulatory reform” was a broad one – it referred to rules and principles that applied to all industries. Today, in the still-simmering wake of the financial crisis, the definition of “regulatory reform” in the U.S. has narrowed.

Now, it typically refers to the financial services industry centered in New York – where today President Obama faces the tall task of outlining his administration’s planned regulatory reforms. more