House Passes Massive Medical Insurance Bill, 219-212

The votes are in: yesterday evening, after a last-minute compromise over abortion payments, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill effecting major changes in American medical finance. From the BBC's coverage: "The president is expected to sign the House-passed Senate bill as early as Tuesday, after which it will be officially enacted into law. However, it will contain some very unpopular measures that Democratic senators have agreed to amend. The Senate will be able to make the required changes in a separate bill using a procedure known as reconciliation, which allows budget provisions to be approved with 51 votes - rather than the 60 needed to overcome blocking tactics." No Republican voted in favor of the bill; 34 Democrats voted against. As law, the system set forth would extend insurance coverage to an estimated 32 million Americans, impose new taxes on high-income earners as well as provide some tax breaks and subsidies for others, and considerably toughen the regulatory regime under which insurance companies operate. The anticipated insurance regime phases in (starting with children, and expanding to adults in 2014) a requirement that insurance providers accept those with preexisting conditions, and creates a system of fines, expected to be administered by the IRS, for those who fail or refuse to obtain health insurance.

Comments

Bad formatting hides sloppy thinking.

[Futurepower(R)]

The 1,990-page health care bill (PDF) is ugly. It's full of insufficiently rigorous thinking and poor quality communication.

Most of the manner in which the new legislation will operate is not specified in the bill. For example, on page 77 it says, "The Secretary shall adopt and regularly update standards consistent with the goals described in paragraph (2)."

The U.S. Congress uses an outdated font. It is not possible to generate a readable copy because each line is preceded by a number. There are numerous quirks, like sometimes capitalizing the word "website".

Here is a guess: Possibly there is no one in the media who writes about the bill who has actually read and understood the bill.

Still, in my opinion the bill is better than nothing. As many have mentioned, the present U.S. health care system would otherwise be one of the biggest causes of U.S. government bankruptcy.

Re:health insurance is like auto insurance now

[computational super]

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a co-worker of mine who grew up in Canada. He told me that he was going door-to-door in high school, selling something or other (I guess they torture kids that way in Canada, too). So he ended up going to the "poor" section of town, where most of the people lived on welfare. He said that when he started knocking on doors, and they opened up, he would peek inside - and the welfare people seemed to have all the same stuff he had. Same video-game consoles, same TV's, same type of furniture... he said he made up his mind then to move to America, where work actually pays off.

That was, of course, until now. Oh, well. I guess it was nice while it lasted.