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Health Reform passed in Senate

WASHINGTON – A pivotal Senate committee has approved a sweeping remake of the country's health care system, delivering a long-sought boost to President Barack Obama's goal of expanding coverage.

The 14-9 vote in the Senate Finance Committee sets up a historic debate on the Senate floor and moves health care overhaul closer to reality than it has been for decades.

Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine was the only Republican to join 13 committee Democrats in voting "yes."

The 10-year, $829-billion plan approved Tuesday is aimed at extending coverage to millions more Americans, holding down costs and improving health care for all.

The Finance Committee was the last of five congressional committees to act. It produced a centrist-leaning compromise bill.

Senate passes Baucus health reform 14- 9

Interesting. I'm looking forward to reading the shitstorm that follows this vote.

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Originally Posted by DaemonSeid (Post 1856916)

Here or in general?

Both.

I've already been caught up in several debates IRL about this. I'm sure GC will follow suit.

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Originally Posted by knight_shadow (Post 1856915)

I'm looking forward to reading the shitstorm that follows this vote.

Masochist. :p

The current legislation as I understand it does away with mandates, but doesn't do much to require that well people buy insurance. This is smart on the part of the Dems as they will be able to use the subsequent rise in insurance prices to ride public opinion to having a public option.

I'm generally in favor of some kind of reform. The trouble with just about everything is that in order to appease special interests, they're ignoring some of the larger issues. It's almost a given that this'll be a bonanza for some special interests.

I read a great article in Rolling Stone Magazine about this. Let me see if I can find it...

AHA - here it is (I love the internet). It's long, but a very detailed explanation of the forces that the special interest groups are having on legislation, and why what we'll actually get out of it won't be very tenable.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...sick_and_wrong

Starts out with: (then really good read when you have the time)

Quote:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

srmom! This article hit the nail on the head. The lawmakers in this country are scurrying around trying to fix the system by lumping more insane broken ideas on top of already failed policies. The system is not really fixable. As a physician, I can't really see how consulting insurance companies and not physicians can improve patient care.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kevin (Post 1856929)

The current legislation as I understand it does away with mandates, but I'm generally in favor of some kind of reform. The trouble with just about everything is that in order to appease special interests, they're ignoring some of the larger issues. It's almost a given that this'll be a bonanza for some special interests.

Wait, you mean like TARP?

Government is not the solution to the problem, it's the problem.

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Originally Posted by Elephant Walk (Post 1856966)

Wait, you mean like TARP?

TARP was also completely ridiculous. Targeted bailouts of Wall Street Banks were needed. Everything else was just an orgy of political favor and corruption.

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Everything else was just an orgy of political favor and corruption.

Our political system in a nutshell. As long as it costs bajoodles of dollars to get elected, lobbyists will have politicians in their back pockets.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk (Post 1856966)

Government is not the solution to the problem, it's the problem.

Yeah, none of the problems with have in health care now can be laid at the feet of insurance companies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk (Post 1856966)

Government is not the solution to the problem, it's the problem.

Yeah, none of the problems with have in health care now can be laid at the feet of insurance companies.

Simplistic statements like "the government is the problem" (or "the insurance companies are the problem") are just that: simplistic.

There's nothing simplistic about this issue.

I'd like to see voters start talking about what they really want: health insurance reform. No one seems to be saying they have a problem with the health care they receive from their health care provider. I don't see any health care providers jumping up and down saying "I want to be paid less for the work I do so everyone can have health care!" but I think that's exactly what we're gonna get.

Say goodbye to your favorite health care provider. She's going to start a new career as a house flipper.

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Originally Posted by crescent&pearls (Post 1857266)

Providers are complicit, though, in the rising cost of health care, right?

Part of health insurance reform is breaking the symbiotic (and grossly pernicious, for the consumer) bond between providers and insurers, which results in both sides benefiting from higher costs, which results in increased haggling between both sides for payment, which in results in higher costs, and so on.

For being groups that supposedly don't get along on a day-to-day basis, providers and insurers seem to be on the same side of the lobbying on this issue.