Senate Committee Rolls out Promising Health Care Bill
And by promising I mean as in, yeah, it could totally work!
Despite some early confusion about the cost of the bill and the extent to which it would provide coverage, the details are now becoming clear.
Ezra Klein provides an overall summary:
The short version is this: CBO estimates that by 2019 the bill will cover 21 million people at a cost of $597 billion. But—and this is important—the HELP Committee’s bill doesn’t include the Medicaid expansion, because Medicaid is under the sole jurisdiction of the Finance Committee. But if Medicaid is expanded to 150 percent, it will cover an additional 20 million at a cost of about $1 trillion. Add in the savings that Finance is expected to get from reforming Medicare and you’re looking at a bill that will cost $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion and cover 42 million people (which would mean 97 percent of the legal population in 2019 would have health insurance) by 2019.
The proposal is able to control costs by imposing an employer mandate - $750 fine per full-time employee per year if you don’t provide health insurance coverage. For part-time employees the cost is $375. (Companies with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from this.) The bill also provides a public plan option, expands Medicaid, provides subsidies for families making too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford health insurance and prevents insurance companies from disqualifying people with pre-existing conditions or from charging widely disparate rates to people based on age or health history. And I did not see a provision for taxing employer paid health benefits as had been speculated previously. Finally the bill provides many incentives for increasing preventive care and improving the quality of health care provided.
In short, me likey! And so does President Obama.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Budget Office scored the cost of the bill and came up with figures that indicated it would be much more expensive and cover a lot fewer people (causing certain Repub senators to go ballistic). It has been clarified now that they scored an incomplete version and the new cost estimates are much more accurate.
This bill and the companion bill from the Finance Committee are close enough to the House version that reconciliation shouldn’t be a painful procedure. The key, of course, is to get it passed by the Senate. Here’s where we come in again. Call, e-mail, fax, Tweet or just shout it out to your Senators that they need to step up to the plate and support this very realistic and badly needed legislation! Folks are dying for lack of health care. And many who are not dying are living lives of reduced quality because of lack of access to care and/or medications. Mr. Reid, that is a cause that is well worth flexing your muscles for.
Posted by marindenver on 07/02/09 at 04:03 PM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Election '08 • Barack Obama • Editorials • Health Care • Nutters •
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