Health Reform on Track for Passage

by: Matt Singer

Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 10:39:00 AM MST

From everything I can tell, the pieces are set and a vote in the next 4-5 days on comprehensive federal health reform is likely to be successful. Ezra has a good run down of the particulars of the bill:

Legislation that covers 32 million people. A world in which 95 percent of all non-elderly, legal residents have health-care coverage. An end to insurers rescinding coverage for the sick, or discriminating based on preexisting conditions, or spending 30 cents of each premium dollar on things that aren't medical care. Exchanges where insurers who want to jack up premiums will have to publicly explain their reason, where regulators will be able to toss them out based on bad behavior, and where consumers will be able to publicly rate them. Hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford health-care insurance. The final closure of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit's "doughnut hole."

But you also get the single most ambitious effort the government has ever made to control costs in the health-care sector. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill cuts deficits by $130 billion in the first 10 years, and up to $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years.

There are some people out there pretty furious about this legislation. I hear talk that it doesn't really control costs (still haven't figured out how comparative effectiveness research and bundling aren't important parts of controlling costs) or that it forces people to buy terrible insurance (the same terrible insurance that it monumentally improves and that so many of us currently fight like hell to hold on to despite rate hikes).

Anyways, I've been working off-and-on on federal health care reform since late '06. This just feels damn good. One more vote to go in the House. One more in the Senate. A signature from the President.

That's how history is made.