insurance reform

It was inevitable that conservatives would attack the Senate health care reform legislation over the proposed o.5 percent hike in Medicare’s payroll tax for the country’s highest earners. Now they’re drilling down into the specifics.
Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze the [...]

In the wake of Saturday’s Senate vote to take up the chamber’s health reform legislation, the focus of the debate has shifted back to the public option, over which no fewer than four Democratic caucus members — Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — have threatened to [...]

Senate Democratic leaders have amended their newly released health reform bill to include a contentious provision allowing some workers to receive cash vouchers toward exchange coverage in lieu of enrolling in employer-based plans. Here’s an explanation from a statement released moments ago by the amendment’s sponsor, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.):
Under the Senate legislation as it [...]

Nothing shocking here. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the chamber floor this morning to decry the Democrats’ $848 billion health reform bill, unveiled about 15 hours earlier.
After six weeks of drafting a bill behind closed doors, the Majority has produced a bill that increases premiums, raises taxes, and slashes Medicare by half [...]

Now that the veil has been lifted, here are a few of the important numbers surrounding the Senate’s health reform bill, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office.

$848 billion: Ten-year cost of the proposal, all of it offset by revenue increases and budget cuts elsewhere.
$130 billion: Amount the bill would reduce budget deficits over 10 years.
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Women should screen for breast cancer less frequently and at a later age, according to new recommendations issued Monday by a well-respected preventative medicine panel.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force, which in 2002 recommended that women begin getting mammograms at age 40, now says 50 is the more appropriate age. The New York Times [...]

The abortion debate in the Senate is looking more and more like that in the House every day.
Last week, it was liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) predicting that anti-abortion lawmakers in the upper chamber wouldn’t be able to rally the 60 votes needed to pass an amendment to health reform legislation restricting abortion. This week, [...]

It’s a nonsensical element of Medicaid’s funding formula that during economic downturns, when state budgets are most squeezed, states are also asked to bear much higher health costs as the Medicaid rolls swell. The result, inevitably, is the erosion of health coverage for the country’s most vulnerable populations.
The $787 billion economic stimulus bill addressed the [...]

Here’s Sen. Charles Grasssley (R-Iowa) in June, telling Fox News that requiring people to buy health insurance is a good idea, analogous to states requiring drivers to purchase car insurance:
There isn’t anything wrong with it, except some people look at it as an infringement upon individual freedom. But when it comes to states requiring it [...]

Not the blue states.
There are roughly 46 million people living in America without health insurance coverage, representing about 15 percent of the nation’s population, according to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. But they aren’t distributed evenly around the country.