Health bill-latest

[KEND]

NY Times 10/4/09
Health Overhaul Is Drawing Close to Floor Debate
ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: October 3, 2009
WASHINGTON — With the Senate Finance Committee set to approve its health care bill this week, Democrats are tantalizingly close to bringing legislation that would make sweeping changes in the nation’s health care system to the floor of both houses of Congress.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, John Kerry and Max Baucus, all Democrats, after a health care hearing ended early Friday.
A blog from The New York Times that tracks the health care debate as it unfolds.
More Health Care Overhaul News
Party leaders still face immense political and policy challenges as they combine rival proposals — two bills in the Senate and three in the House. But the broad contours of the legislation are in place: millions of uninsured Americans would get subsidized health benefits, and the government would move to slow the growth of health spending.
Senior Democrats said they were increasingly confident that a bill would pass this year. “I am Scandinavian, and we don’t like to overstate anything,” said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and an architect of the Finance Committee bill. “But I have a solid feeling about the direction of events.”

President Obama, in his weekly address on Saturday, noted Friday’s dismal unemployment numbers and said the health care overhaul would bolster small businesses and create jobs.
Mr. Obama called the overhaul “a critical step in rebuilding our economy” and said he was working with his economic advisers “to explore additional options to promote job creation.”
Step by difficult step, the legislative process is lurching forward. Proponents say they see some momentum — more than they saw in Congress 15 years ago, when President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal health coverage collapsed.
As Senate Democrats try to secure the 60 votes needed to overcome a possible Republican filibuster, intricate details and big hurdles stand in their way. Republicans have said they will fight the legislation at every turn.
The policy challenges are also daunting. In the space of one year, the Democrats are trying to restructure one-sixth of the economy, writing a bill that will affect almost every American, every business and every doctor and hospital in the country.
Three House committees approved health care bills in July, as did the Senate health panel. After hearing from constituents in August — some furious, some pleading for change — many Democrats returned to the Capitol determined to plow ahead. They were also emboldened by Mr. Obama’s speech to Congress on Sept. 9 that cast the legislation as a moral and political imperative.
The Finance Committee is expected to approve its bill this week, after receiving cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. And while the panel made numerous changes over seven days of public debate, the core components of its more centrist proposal, developed in months of bipartisan talks, are still intact.
After the committee votes, a new, potentially more perilous phase will begin as party leaders put together the final proposals they will take to the floor of the Senate and the House.
These are some of the huge issues that remain:
¶The major House and Senate bills would require most Americans to carry insurance. This individual mandate could touch off an angry public reaction, especially if the penalties for violations are taxes collected by the Internal Revenue Service. Many lawmakers want to minimize the penalties.
¶Whether the government should require employers to provide health benefits to their employees, or pay a penalty, is still an open question. Liberal Democrats say yes. Moderate Democrats are unsure. Republicans are generally opposed.
¶Lawmakers have not decided how to pay for the legislation, expected to cost about $900 billion over 10 years, though they insist that it will not add to the deficit. The House has proposed a surtax on high-income people, while the Senate proposed an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans.
¶Democrats are divided over whether to create a government insurance company to compete with private insurers. The more liberal House will probably not pass a health care bill without such a public insurance option, while the Senate appears unlikely to pass one with it.
¶Lawmakers are looking for ways to provide more generous subsidies to help low- and middle-income people buy insurance. Many Democrats and some Republicans, like Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, insist that insurance must be affordable if people are required to buy it.
¶While Congressional leaders say they want to curb the explosive growth of health costs, it is unclear whether the final bill will make a serious effort to do so. Every proposal meets resistance from health care providers who fear a loss of income, even as they stand to gain millions of paying customers if nearly everyone has insurance.
Mr. Conrad said that even some Republicans seemed to recognize the likelihood that Congress would pass major health care legislation this year. “I thought there was an air of resignation that settled over our colleagues on the other side of the aisle,” he said.
But Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, predicted that opposition would grow. “It would be very difficult for a bill like the Finance Committee bill to pass the Senate,” he said. “There is nothing inevitable about such a bill. There is nothing predictable about the Senate floor.”
Republicans are not waiting for the finished product and have unleashed a barrage of criticism. In addition to expanding government and raising taxes, they say, the Democratic plans will hurt older Americans by cutting Medicare, intrude on personal freedom by forcing people to buy insurance and impose new costs on states by expanding Medicaid.
Democrats said that once the Finance Committee acts this week, they will be closer than ever to carrying out a major overhaul of the health care system — a goal that has eluded presidents and Congress for more than a half-century.
More Articles in Health » A version of this article appeared in print on October 4, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

I rarely side with the Republicans on any issue but in this case I think there are some major issues of freedom of choice in this bill that need to be resolved.
My contentions are as follows:

If you dont want to be insured you could face fines etc
The bill is a windfall for big pharma-more people to fill up with drugs they dont need at the public expense, I doubt if the insurance will cover many forms of alternative medicine
Anybody who thinks there will be a reining in of health costs must still believe in father xmas
It is another signpost on the road of delegating your wellbeing into the hands of 'experts' who are largely motivated by the profit motive[see thread on vaccines] and not taking responsibility for your actions[obesity, smoking etc]

[Chanchu]

They are about to fuck up American health care beyond repair..

There is no stopping it....

[Michael]

It is another signpost on the road of delegating your wellbeing into the hands of 'experts' who are largely motivated by the profit motive[see thread on vaccines] and not taking responsibility for your actions[obesity, smoking etc]

Everyone is ultimately responsible for their own health, but I think that profit motive has translated into a social planning campaign resulting in obesity and excessive smoking through massive advertising and chemically manipulating the food. Sugar is massively addictive.

[KEND]

I find it surprising that a large percentage of the population cannot see beyond the end of their nose, that educated, apparently intelligent people will accept attractively packaged information without questioning it. Maybe it is a form of 'survival of the fittest', triage under the 'new world order'

[Wuyizidi]

Fear about socialism when it comes to publicly funded medical care is nothing new.

Here's Ronald Reagan, spokesperson for the anti-Medicare movement back in 1961: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_co ... trap-.html

If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Normal Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

It must be the effect of those 48 years of socialism that now old people in townhall meetings are yelling "keep government hands off my Medicare!"

[qiphlow]

all this talk of socialized medicine, yet not a single plan being touted mentions a way to deliver healthcare WITHOUT the insurance companies being involved in the process.
hardly socialized.

[Michael]

Centrally controlled health care from Washington for 300+ million people is not attractive. Smaller, local groups could try and work something out, but the free market is really where it's at and the plan can then be whatever works best. With free market, you also avoid subsidies that effectively penalize alternative care by making them appear more expensive to the consumer compared to the government sanctioned and subsidized health care that has come under the influence of an amoral profit motive from big pharma and the HMO's.