A call, and sort of a plan, for health-care reform
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee, has been working on health-care reform since long before Barack Obama was elected president. (Any legilsation on this subject would have to go through his committee.) This week he released a white paper, which he says is not proposed legislation but a "Call to Action." (Executive summary here (scroll down a bit); full text here.)
The highlights: 1) Baucus seems to be threading the needle between the practical issue of how quickly anything could be enacted (he says at least three years) and the urgent need to move as quickly as possible. And 2) he would require everybody to buy health insurance (with a sliding price scale to benefit the less-well-off), balanced by the kind of protection for people with pre-existing conditions that's rare, if not impossible to find, in the free market.
He doesn't say anything about how to pay for the plan, possibly because it's kind of vague.
Maggie Mahar of the Health Beat blog has a 2-part analysis up (Part 1, Part 2). Given Baucus' committee chairmanship, there's a strong possibility that any legislation that does come to pass will look a lot like this "Call to Action."
Robert Laszewski at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review also analyzes the plan.
