/ 20 October 2009

Barack Obama’s healthy option

The United States Senate finance committee was set to pass a Bill last week to extend insurance to tens of millions of Americans.

The United States Senate finance committee was set to pass a Bill last week to extend insurance to tens of millions of Americans, boosting President Barack Obama’s hopes of securing the elusive goal of universal healthcare.

Although the debate will continue in Congress for several months, the Senate finance Bill is significant because it suggests that the argument has moved beyond whether Obama will get legislation passed, to what will be in it. It offers a basic framework for eventual legislation, the closest glimpse yet of what reform might look like.

Obama has managed to go further towards securing universal healthcare than any of his predecessors, who have been struggling since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 to introduce it.

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the finance committee, made a last-minute plea to Republican senators to vote for the Bill, saying: ”This is our opportunity to make history.”

The Democrats enjoy a 13-10 majority on the committee.

Most Republicans are opposed to reform, expressing concern about the estimated $829-billion cost.

Charles Grassley, one of the most senior Republicans on the committee, described the Bill as a ”march leftward”.

The Bill follows one passed in July by the Senate health committee, and three from House committees. But the finance committee is the one that has attracted the most interest, in part because it was the only one where a big effort was made by the Democrats to win over Republicans.

Democratic senators are now set to sit down to resolve differences between the health and finance committee Bills before putting a compromise Bill on the Senate floor, possibly later this month, for further debate. Discussions between the Democrats and Republicans on reform began last November.

The finance committee Bill would extend health insurance coverage to about 30-million Americans and would for the first time in US history come close to providing health coverage for all. Excluded would be an estimated 20-million illegal immigrants, even though they form an integral part of the US economy.

The Bill will disappoint liberals because it does not contain a public health option offering a government alternative to private health insurance. It proposes, instead, that individuals gather in cooperatives to use their muscle to negotiate lower prices from insurance companies.

The Senate and the House disagree on how to pay for the reform. Democratic senators favour a tax on high-value health insurance policies to raise revenue. The House wants to charge millionaires.

The vote was the focus of a last-minute onslaught from the US health insurance industry. On Monday a report by America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, claimed that proposals in the Bill would see the average cost of health insurance policies for families rise from $12300 to $25900 by 2019. —