The New York Times is doing a marvelous job outlining the key components of health reform that are coming up for debate this summer. To see the baseball-like scorecard of the different camps in the House, Senate and White House, please see their overview from last week here.
There are three plans racing towards the White House for approval currently: two in the Senate and one in the House.
The Senate Health Committee (chaired by Senator Dodd instead of Senator Kennedy) is focused on individual mandates and a public health plan. They have started drafting a plan, but details are still murky.
The Senate Finance Committee (chaired by Max Baucus and the ranking republican Charles Grassley) is leaning towards mandates with an insurance cooperative. They're looking at ways to pay for this by taxing employer-paid health benefits (in some scale), and scaling back public programs, including "Medicare payments to teaching hospitals." (This is also called GME money and I'm a little worried about what this might mean to an academic medical center.)
The House committees that are working together to draft a single plan (Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor Committees) are looking at mandates and a public insurance option. How they propose to pay for their plan is still murky, but there's been talk about sin taxes on a federal level (alcohol, cigarettes, soft drinks, etc.).
The White House wants to sign something into law by October of this year. Stay tuned as this debate unfolds and we see where our future lies.
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