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The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee continues to plow through hundreds of amendments as it works on its health overhaul bill. Here's a short selection of amendments, which show a wide range of interests and concerns, and are pending unless otherwise marked.
"Ad Audit" is KFF Health News's new feature examining advertising campaigns designed to influence the health reform debate. In this campaign, called "What If?", Health Care for America Now, an advocacy group funded by unions and other organizations favoring major health care changes, pushes one of the most controversial elements of the Democratic-backed legislation: a new government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.
The Web site Politics Daily asked two experts to debate perhaps the hottest topic in health reform: Whether to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance plans. The debaters on the so-called "public option" are Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now and James Gelfand, senior manager of health policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Everybody knew that a complete overhaul of the nation's health care system was going to be an expensive undertaking.
As head of the American Hospital Association, Richard Umbdenstock has a daunting task: fending off billions of dollars in payment cuts to hospitals proposed by the Obama administration to help pay for a health care overhaul. Umbdenstock has been president and CEO of AHA, which represents 5,000 hospitals, since 2007. Before that, he headed Providence Health & Services, a large hospital system in Spokane, Wash. He talked to KFF Health News Correspondent Phil Galewitz.
The health care reform discussion is beginning-at last!-to get real. On June 9, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee released a draft bill, and the Congressional Budget Office published an estimate that the bill would cost $1 trillion over 10 years and leave 35 million uninsured.
The government shoudn't be the arbiter that makes final decisions on the value of one treatment over another, but can play an important role in collecting and disseminating information about the most effective treatments.
The Congressional Budget Office took center stage this week when its assessment of a health overhaul plan fueled criticism of its cost. Little known outside of Washington, the CBO is an arbiter of the cost and impact of legislation -- meaning it will continue to play a critical role in the health reform debate. Senate Finance Committee Democrats, meanwhile, vow to re-tool their as-yet-unreleased proposal to make it less costly.
Three former Senate leaders unveiled a bipartisan health care reform package Wednesday that includes individual and employer mandates, as well as a tax on health benefits.
Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Wednesday becomes the first panel in Congress to formally start work on a bill to overhaul the nation's health system. But Kennedy, still undergoing treatment for brain cancer, won't be there in person to drop the gavel.
When people in Floyd County, Va., visit Dr. Susan Osborne, they can pay for their medicals exam with vegetables, lessons, carpentry services as well as cash. Bartering is a way of life in the rural area, Dr. Osborne says: "It just gives people another avenue to have health care."
With many people strapped for cash, barter "exchanges" for health care is providing a temporary safety net of sorts for some workers who have lost their jobs and health coverage. And in some cases, people who have inadequate insurance are using barter to get critical services, such as dental and vision benefits.
As one of the House's chief deputy whips and vice chairwoman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado is helping map her party's strategy on health care legislation. Earlier this year, she pressed for an expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. She talked with KFF Health News Senior Correspondent Mary Agnes Carey.
Three decades before President Obama went to Chicago to speak to the American Medical Association, a Carter administration official delivered a similar message to the nation's physicians.
A new analysis of a major Senate health reform bill reports it would cost the government $1 trillion but reduce the number of uninsured by a net of only 16 million. The estimates by the Congressional Budget Office provided Republican critics with fresh ammunition on a day when President Obama was defending his plan before a national audience of doctors.
A low-profile commission that advises Congress on Medicare recommends, as it has in the past, that the way health providers are paid be revamped. Congress is showing interest in the issue as it grapples with broader health reform.
President Barack Obama urged doctors to support a health care overhaul when he spoke to the annual meeting of the American Medical Association today in Chicago. Video courtesy of C-SPAN.
Doctors say lack of health insurance and not enough time with patients are major problems.
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