The Senate scheduled a vote this coming week on a budget bill that the House approved on Thursday. The deal is designed to avert another government shutdown. “I realize that’s a low bar,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a member of the Senate Budget Committee. The House went home for the holidays without extending unemployment benefits that run out after Christmas for 1.3 million people.  With Americans scoring our health care worse than people in other countries,  Sanders on Monday introduced legislation to provide better care at less cost to more people.

Budget Deal Assessing the pros and cons of the budget agreement, Sanders said the best thing about the legislation is something that was left out of it altogether. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were spared from the budget cutters’ knives.  Sanders had led a grassroots effort that gathered more than 700,000 signatures on petitions against reducing earned benefits under the retirement and health care programs. Congressional budget experts also credited Sanders with blocking a proposal to eliminate Saturday mail.  And the budget blueprint loosens a little the straightjacket of the across-the-board cuts known in Washington-speak as sequestration. On the other hand, Sanders was disappointed that there is nothing in the bill to create jobs, the thing Americans in poll after poll say should be the No. 1 priority for Congress. He also objected to leaving out an extension of unemployment benefits that expire next week. And Sanders would have lowered the deficit by closing loopholes that let profitable corporations and the wealthiest Americans evade paying their fair share of taxes.

Unemployment The House adjourned for the year without doing anything to help more than 1.3 million Americans who were out of work for six months or more and now face an unemployment insurance cutoff in a few days.  Unless Congress acts, another 1.9 million would lose benefits later in the coming year. Some 600 Vermonters face an immediate cutoff after Dec. 28, and 2,300 more Vermonters could lose benefits later in 2014, according to the National Employment Law Project.

Better Health Care for More People at Less Cost Sanders on Monday introduced legislation to provide health care for every American through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. Sanders supported the Affordable Care Act, but he told The Daily Beast that Obamacare’s “modest step forward toward dealing with the dysfunction of the American health-care system” still lets insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers rake off billions of dollars in profits that other nations devote to providing care. Read Sanders' bill, Read more in The Daily Beast

Who has the Best Health Care in the World?  Who doesn’t like American health care? Americans don’t. A recent survey for the Commonwealth Fund of people from 11 countries found Americans were the least satisfied with their own health care system. The study looked at costs, wait times, barriers to access, quality of care and other measures. In the survey, 75 percent of Americans said our health care system needs fundamental changes or should be completely rebuilt. Read more about the Commonwealth Fund survey

VA Disability Claims The Veterans Affairs Department official in charge of benefits predicted at a Senate hearing chaired by Sanders on Wednesday that a backlog of almost 400,000 claims for disability benefits will be eliminated by 2015. Allison A. Hickey, the VA undersecretary for benefits, testified that the backlog of disability compensation and pension claims was reduced by 36 percent since March. Sanders said that the backlog can be attributed in part to the department’s slow transition from paper to a digital records system.