FixHealthCarePolicy

Taxing the Sick: How “Fees” in Health Care Reform Hurt Patients

The Senate Finance Committee has concluded its consideration of the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009. The legislation intends to address a number of policy objectives, but one overriding concern is controlling the rising cost of health care.[1] As a recent White House report notes, “Americans pay more for health care each year but get less coverage and fewer services for the premiums they pay. . . . With each passing year, families face increasing deductibles, copayments, and other out-of-pocket expenses, requiring them to make difficult decisions in order to make ends meet.”[2] It is surprising, therefore, that some of the provisions of this legislation will in fact lead to higher costs for health care consumers. (more…)

Tags: AEI, finance committee

Read the Bill! What Bill?

Live from the Senate Finance Committee Mark-up

During the Senate Finance Committee mark up of the Baucus health bill today Senator Bunning of Kentucky put forth an innovative amendment. This amendment stipulated that before voting on the measure in Committee, legislative language would have to be accessible to the public for 72 hours and that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would need to publish an official tally of how much this bill will cost the American people and what the real impact will be on health costs.

There are several key points to the importance of this amendment that have to be highlighted:

1. What the Finance Committee is debating and amending is a 220-page conceptual outline of policy changes that will not be translated into actual legislative language until after the committee finishes debating and voting on amendments to this conceptual document. (more…)

Tags: baucus, Bunning Amendment, finance committee, Obama Health Care Plan

Passing a Shell of A Bill: Congress’ Secret Plan to Ram Through Health Care Reform

With the President and Congress’s plan to pass comprehensive health care reform reaching increasingly high levels of unpopularity, and reconciliation becoming an impediment, the leadership of the Senate is rumored to be preparing a new secret plan to railroad the bill through the Senate in record time by using a seldom used parliamentary procedure.

Their plan is to proceed to a House passed non-health care bill to provide a shell of legislation to give Obamacare a ride to the House then to the President’s desk. Sound confusing? We lay out the steps below, but essentially the Senate would pass health care reform as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill so the Senate and House could act quickly and without further debate. Even worse? Nobody really knows what that legislation looks like but they plan on voting for it anyway.

Right now, the Senate Finance Committee is in the midst of marking up health care reform “legislation.” Due to Senate procedure, what they are actually marking up is a 200+ page conceptual framework of the actual legislation, not a real bill. That means that not only has no Senator even read the bill but, there is a high probability that the bill hasn’t even been written yet. If the Committee sticks to their artificial deadline of completing work by this Friday then they would have passed a conceptual document reforming the nation’s health care system, spending trillions, without ever seeing an estimated 1,500 pages of legislation, which may or may not be written.

The current plan is to start debate on Obamacare as early as next week under the following four-step scenario: (more…)

Tags: baucus, finance committee, Harry Reid, HELP committee, Obama Health Care Plan, ObamaCare, reconciliation, tax