Senate Health Care Bill to be an Early Christmas Present

Barring any last minute roadblocks, the senate will convene at 8AM on 12/24/2009 to vote on their version of the Health Care Reform bill. Then they will all head out of town for the holiday break.

It has been a long road (almost 100 years if you go back to the first attempts at Health Care reform legislation) and it isn't over yet. There would still need to be a committee reconciliation resolving the differences between the House and Senate bills, which then would need to be voted on by both parts of Congress.

There are complaints on both the Right (this will destroy health care) and the Left (nothing should be passed without a public option), which instinctively leads me to believe that maybe we got this bill right.

Although this bill is "watered-down" from what Progressives want and is a horror story to conservatives, there are a few basic things that this bill will do that have been needed for a very long time:

1) Up to 30 Million US citizens who are not currently insured will be able to obtain insurance through exchanges, in many cases with public subsidies making it more affordable.

2) Insurance companies will not be able to refuse coverage for pre-existing conditions or terminate a policy due to illness/injury.

I covered these and a few other not so trivial benefits in a post almost 3 months ago.

What we may not get at this point is a Public Option. I had previously surmised that as long as a Public Option was part of the House or Senate bills, it had a good chance to make it into the final reconciled bill. Even though the Public Option was included in the House bill, I am no longer very certain it will be in the final bill. As I said in that post, I still believe the Public Option, although a great rallying cry for Progressives, would have minimal impact. I think the White House knows this. I think they also know that they can accomplish many of the same goals (function) with different pieces of this and future bills (form) that will not have a bulls-eye on them.

Some progressives have called for running a strong public option bill through the reconciliation process, calling the bluff of opponents and making them try a filibuster or just abandoning this "watered-down" Health Care reform bill. However, one of the original and loudest proponents of the Public Option, Yale Professor Jacob S. Hacker, writes that this bill should be passed now.

I agree.

Once passed, it is unlikely to ever get overturned unlike a reconciliation bill which just expires after 5 years (like the Bush tax cuts).

It will be much easier to add and modify pieces to an existing bill as nothing will attract anywhere near the public attention, with quite so much misinformation and differences of opinion on impact as the current Health Care Reform bill.

This bill will not be good as some people want it to be.
This bill will not be as bad as some people fear it will be.
It is a start. A good start and long overdue.