Affordable Care Act

You can sum up Obama's strategy for health reform as "WWCD": What Wouldn't the Clintons Do. And it's working well so far. It seems likely that Obama will have a bill to sign by year's end. But will it be legislation that people actually like?

Earlier this month, lobbyists trooped in to watch as the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions began working on a health-care overhaul - the first congressional panel this year to move so far.

The Democratic members of three House committees today released a plan they said would lower health care costs and improve health care choices. They plan includes individual as well as employer mandates to buy insurance and would provide for a government-run public plan alternative to private insurance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

President Barack Obama today addressed the annual meeting of the American Medical Association. He discussed the future of the health care system and asked for their help with health reform.

One of the more promising signs for health care reform over the past two years has been the apparent support of the business community.