How the Senate Bill Would Change Healthcare

[FreakinDJ]

Source: By Rick Newman Rick Newman – Thu Dec 24, 7:47 am ET

How the Senate Bill Would Change Healthcare

It's not official yet--but it's getting awfully close. With the Senate finally passing an $871 billion healthcare reform bill, there's just one major step left before the most sweeping healthcare legislation in at least 45 years becomes law. Senate negotiators will next meet with their counterparts in the House--which passed its own $894 billion bill in November--to work out the differences and try to forge one bill that Congress can present to President Obama.

The last hurdle is a high one, though. Like most of the deliberations so far, the House-Senate negotiations will probably be rancorous and tense, with familiar standoffs over the cost of healthcare reform, new fees and taxes, the virtues of a public option, abortion coverage, and pet projects rolled into the bill even though they have nothing to do with healthcare. Obama had hoped to have a signed bill that he could tout during his State of the Union speech, which typically occurs in late January or early February. But the two chambers may still be dickering when Obama takes to the podium. Still, momentum is building toward a historic set of new rules that will profoundly change healthcare, for better or worse.


One reason the final negotiations will be so daunting is that both bills contain hundreds of provisions that would impose new rules on insurers, healthcare providers, employers and patients, while also setting up numerous pilot programs to experiment with ways to provide better, cheaper care. Here are a few provisions of the Senate bill that would impact consumers the most, with a summary of how the House bill compares:



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20091224/ts_usnews/howthesenatebillwouldchangehealthcare

---

Nice summary

[countingbluecars]

1. Interesting article.

Thanks for posting.

[avaistheone1]

2. If this bill doesn't get improved in a major way in conference the only winners coming out of this

are the health insurance companies.

[ananda]

3. That was the plan all along.

A nice xmas bonus for insurers and the legislators
they own.

Nothing for us peons.

[fascisthunter]

4. It was all a Dog and Pony Show from the Beginning

when I saw this thing unfold, there were plenty ofd mixec messages by a variety of spokespeople on tv. Slowly you saw Obama morph his message from a populist message to a compromised corporate message. His populist message was a sham from the beginning, as he only surrounded himself with those whose ideology was fascist or how about the PC term, "corporatist".

[No Elephants]

10. And drug companies and big hospitals. And the states of deal makers, like Nelson and Landrieu.

Oh, yeah--and the politicians whom WE allow to get away with this.

[whathappened]

5. hope

looks like hope just got flushed down the drain , all that is left is to eat shit and die , why can't these fookers get anything right , its simple , just exspand medicare , kill the 20% copay , tax the fook out of the rich fookers , we got a health care plan

[Katidid]

6. fookin' right

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

[groundloop]

7. There's a ton of misinformation and misunderstanding out there

I was talking to an older lady yesterday, she asked what I thought of the new healthcare law. I said something to the effect, without going into much detail, that the House bill wasn't too bad, but that while the Senate bill had a few good itmes in it that overall I thought it was a train wreck. When she repeated verbatim some right wing talking points about socialized medicine etc. etc. I realized she didn't know much about this, so I told her how United Healthcare has been able, for over a year, to deny a procedure that would restore my wife's hearing. The lady said that was horrible. I mentioned that the CEO of United Healthcare makes in excess of $24 million per year, she said that was outrageous. I mentioned that it would take less than 3 hours of United Healthcares CEO's wages to pay for my wife's surgery, she said that was ridiculous. I told her I didn't think it was right to deny people healthcare because they just happened to get sick at the same time that they were without a job. She said it was awful that insurance companies can get away with that. I said that I thought it would be a good idea to let people younger than 65 buy into Medicare, she said that sounded like a good idea. Then I mentioned that eventually I'd like to see Medicare expanded to cover all Americans, she said that sounded like a good idea too. But she said she was afraid of socialized medicine, like they have in Canada.

It's unfortunate, but the right wing has done an artful job of misleading people about healthcare reform. We need to keep pushing congress on this, to keep writing our local papers on this, and to keep donating to progressive and democratic candidates and causes ('cause the repugs sure the hell won't advance healthcare if they regain power, and will likely try to roll back whatever gains we see come out of the final bill).

[SandWalker1984]

8. We were warned about this over 200 years ago....

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning Americans over two hundred years ago:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."


The Democrats, today, on behalf of the health care industry, made it happen with their vote to mandate we buy insurance from private corporations or pay fines/go to jail.

[No Elephants]

11. Some seem to doubt that Rush ever said anything like that.

"Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), the ‘father’ of American psychiatry, is perhaps best known as the inventor of the ‘tranquilizing chair’. In recent decades, political and psychiatric activists have attributed a quotation to him in which he allegedly warned: ‘To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science.’ The source of this quotation cannot be found, and Rush’s remarks about ‘medical despotism’ are inconsistent with the body of his work. Other examples are cited to illustrate the thesis that false attributions, used to support and advance particular ideological causes, are remarkably resistant to efforts at correction. "

http://hpy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/1/89

[Djarun]

9. This does not help me any...

by the time they get done "reconciling" the lawyers and lobbyists will have undone any intention of reform or anything similar.

[No Elephants]

12. Exactly how do we know this is a "nice summary?" The source seems mighty pro-corporate.