A Health Care Bill We Can Believe In?

Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet at 8:00 AM on July 15, 2009.

The chairmen of three committees in the House of Representatives announced yesterday that their committees had jointly crafted a health reform bill -- one that includes a public plan for insuring people who have been shut out of the system. As the The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein notes, this is something just short of a miracle:

Three separate committees -- Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor -- have come together on one bill. This is an incredible achievement. If you read histories of the 1994 health-care reform fight, all of them have a substantial section on the committee crack-up: One passed a version of single-payer, another a variant of Bill Clinton's reform, another went further to the right. There was no unity.

There is unity now. And if it holds -- if the House of Representatives manages to pass this plan with a substantial majority of enthusiastic Democrats -- that significantly strengthens the House's hand in its eventual negotiations with the more fractious Senate. That's a big "if." But so too would have been the idea that three separate committees could cooperate on a bill of this size.

The bill includes a federally-funded expansion of Medicaid to people earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level, and subsidies for those making up to 400 percent of the poverty level -- according to Klein, that’s about $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four.

(Klein offers a run-down of the bill’s provisions, as does The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn.)

On the contentious topic of reproductive health coverage, Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect notes:

The bill mentions "family planning" coverage both in the context of Medicaid and the public plan, but uses a definition of "family planning" that excludes abortion. So it refers explicitly to contraceptive coverage, but not to abortion coverage.

(But don’t expect that to keep right-wing fear-mongers from trying to scuttle the public plan when the bill gets to the Senate by dangling the false threat of taxpayer-funded abortions.)

While the bill doesn’t have everything progressives want, it’s still likely to meet opposition from some conservative Democrats. After all, the means for paying for the trillion-dollar plan has yet to be agreed upon. Nonetheless, both Families USA, the 25-year-old healthcare advocacy organization, and Health Care for America Now!, the year-old coalition group that includes MoveOn.org and SEIU, have endorsed the House bill. Three committees, one bill, and the endorsement of progressive organizations. Now, there’s a miracle. Let see what happens in the Senate.

Tagged as: healthcare, health care, henry waxman, ezra klein, families usa, house committee on energy, house committee on ways a, house commitee on educati, dana goldstein, jonathan chait

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's acting Washington Bureau Chief.