Health Care For America Now

NEWS

White House Confronts Insurers on Premiums - Wall Street Journal

Obama Cites Rising Rates in Push for Health Overhaul, as Industry Executives Say Hospitals, Drug Makers Are to Blame

Obama Takes Health Care Deadline to Democrats - New York Times

President Obama, beginning a full-court press for his health care overhaul, met Thursday with insurance industry executives and House Democrats as party leaders on Capitol Hill struggled to figure out whether they could meet the president’s timetable for enacting legislation within a few weeks.

Liberals grill Obama on health reform - The Hill

House liberals pressed President Barack Obama on healthcare reform Thursday and left the White House without making any commitments to vote for the final bill.

NRCC "Code Red" Robocalls Spread Debunked Health Care Smears - Media Matters

In a last ditch attempt to derail Democratic efforts to expand health care coverage, the National Republican Congressional Committee is launching a robocall campaign to spread lies and scare voters.  In contrast to the NRCC's lies, health care reform will lower health insurance premiums and create up to 4 million American jobs.

A Brief History of Senate Reconciliation Votes - Sunlight Foundation

As Democrats move forward to pass health care reform attention has focused on a key piece of Senate rules known as budget reconciliation. This post takes Senate vote records covering 13 key reconciliation votes from 1990 to 2007 to show how senators in both parties voted–and how sitting senators voted in the past–on a variety of reconciliation bills.

OPINION

Exclusive: 'Wellpoint would be a primary beneficiary' if reform fails, investment firm says - Ezra Klein

That comes from the first page of the Cowen and Co.'s assessment (pdf) of Wellpoint stock in 2010 and beyond. The argument is simple: Wellpoint's business model is uncommonly concentrated in the individual and small-group markets. Those are the exact markets that health-care reform will drastically change. Those are the markets where people get rejected for preexisting conditions, where insurers spend 30 cents of every premium dollar on administration and where rate hikes are volatile and constant. Health-care reform wants to change all of that, and if it does, Wellpoint's business model will be changed, too.

Health reform that won't break the bank - Peter Orszag and Nancy-Ann DeParle

Health-insurance reform offers many benefits, such as common-sense rules of the road and basic consumer protections to keep insurance companies honest and prevent them from denying coverage to anyone because of a preexisting medical condition. But some critics complain that the administration has slipped in its commitment to fiscal responsibility in health reform.

That “Controversial” Reconciliation Process - Matt Yglesias

I was pretty damn certain that if you went back to coverage of the 2003 tax cuts, passed by reconciliation, it’s not just that Republicans didn’t have a problem with reconciliation back then, the media just didn’t make a big deal out of it. After all, we’re talking about a decades-old procedural option that sets up a situation in which the side with more votes wins. It’s neither interesting nor controversial.

The Oxymoron Columnist - The Health Care Blog

Charles Krauthammer's columns in the Washington Post are like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, must-reading for anyone who wants to keep up with the illogical fulminations and small-minded cruelties of what passes for intellectual discourse on the right. The intellectual bankruptcy of today's offering shows not only why health care reform should pass, but why it will.