The Senate Healthcare Plan is Revealed

The Senate has finally produced its health care compromise, but in the quest to find something everyone can live with, have they come up with a bill no one really likes…

No one seems to argue that America’s health care system is in need of change.

It eats up twice as much per capita as any other industrialized country, and we rank 37th in the world in health outcomes.

The cost of medical care is rising at over 3 times the us inflation rate.

But, is the huge senate healthcare bill really the answer?

This is HR 3590 al 1074 pages of it. Now admittedly, the US health care system is huge, one 17th, one 18th of the economy, and you’re not going to reform that with a 10-page bill. But to read this by the Saturday vote, you’d have to read a page a minute, 24-hours a day until the Saturday vote. That’s going to be tough.

It differs from the house version in some key ways, the most prominent of which is that it allows public funds for abortion in some limited cases.

The total 10-year cost is $848 billion dollars, but the plan doesn’t kick in until 2014 and taxes to pay for it begin immediately.

Medicare payroll taxes would go up, and Medicare payments to doctors would go down. But the primary cuts would come from so-called Medicare Advantage, which uses private insurers.

The House plan is funded primarily by high income tax hikes, and the Senate by taxing high content private plans.

The Senate bill, as mentioned, is 2074 pages long. For comparison, the Stimulus Package was 1100 pages, and President Clinton’s healthcare plan ran just over 1300 pages.