Senate OK’s health care bill in victory for Obama – Yahoo! News

Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 1:21 am

WASHINGTON – In an epic struggle settled at dawn, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed health care legislation Thursday, a triumph for President Barack Obama that clears the way for compromise talks with the House on a bill to reduce the ranks of the uninsured and rein in the insurance industry.
At the White House, Obama called the vote historic, and said because of it, “we are incredibly close to making health insurance reform a reality in this country. The House passed its bill in November, and officials said it was likely to be February before the two sides can sort out their differences over issues as diverse as government’s role in a remade health care system, coverage for abortion and federal subsidies for lower and middle-income families who would be required to purchase insurance.
Senate Republican attacked the bill to the end, and citing public opinion polls, said they would use it as an issue in the 2010 congressional elections. “This debate was supposed to produce a bill that reformed health care in America. For the third time since Sunday night, Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, 92, was wheeled into the Senate so he could cast his vote. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., did not vote.
Beginning in 2014, the Senate bill would establish insurance exchanges where consumers could shop for private coverage sold under federal guidelines. Insurance companies would be banned from denying benefits or charging higher fees on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions. Literally hundreds of issues remain to be settled in the two bills, a House measure that ran to 1,990 pages and a Senate version of 2,074, not counting 383 pages of revisions that Reid unveiled over the weekend.
To finance extended coverage, the House bill relies on an income tax surcharge on incomes over $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples, a provision the Senate omitted. Its bill includes higher Medicare payroll taxes on high wage-earners and a new tax on high-cost insurance policies that labor unions generally oppose.
Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, is expanded in both bills, but the House provision includes many more people. The House legislation also requires large employers to provide insurance to their workers or pay a fine. There is no such mandate in the Senate bill, although companies would face penalties if any of their uninsured employees qualified for federal subsidies to purchase their own insurance.
The House-passed bill is estimated to extend coverage to more individuals than the Senate measure, 36 million over a decade as opposed to 31 million.
The agency says the approximate average subsidy in 2019 under the House will would be $6,800 a year; for the Senate bill, it is $5,600. Those differences reflect one of the biggest contrasts between the two bills — the $574 billion the House bill provides for subsidies over a decade, as opposed to $336 billion under the Senate measure.
Over 10 years, the House bill closes a gap in coverage under Medicare prescription drug benefits popularly known as the doughnut hole. The Senate bill reduces but does not eliminate that interruption in coverage, although Reid has pledged to defer to the House, a pledge made to secure AARP’s endorsement for the bill.

The House bill has one, a provision its liberal supporters said was designed to put pressure on the insurance companies to hold down premium prices.

Democratic moderates insisted no such plan make it into the Senate bill, which calls instead for national plans overseen by the same office that manages health coverage for federal employees and members of Congress. The bill is H.R. 3590

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