Word: reformations
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...news coverage. Still, the White House now seems to realize that a series of press conferences or political speeches across the country, or even an historic address to a joint session of Congress (as Clinton tried), will not be enough to get over the finish line. Health-care reform is so politically fraught that it needs a strong White House presence in the room, something that happened only late last week in the House (when Emanuel became personally involved in the talks with the Blue Dogs) but has yet to start with the Senate...
...bill produced in the House nor the one written by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee - Ted Kennedy's panel - would yield savings in the long run. On the contrary, Democrats on Capitol Hill are having a hard time coming up with ways to keep reform from raising the cost of health care over the next decade. This has given lots of ammunition to both Republican and fiscally conservative Democratic critics of the health-care proposals. And it puts a lot of pressure on the Senate Finance Committee - the last Senate committee dealing with health-care reform...
...Medicare payments, took a hit late last week when the CBO estimated it would save only $2 billion over 10 years. The CBO acknowledged that the savings could turn out to be higher in the long run, but that qualifier highlighted one of the biggest problems for health-care-reform backers: the potential cost savings of overhauling the entire health-care system are unknown and impossible to predict with any accuracy. The CBO, for instance, has no real way to determine how much investments in prevention might save down the line...
...Raising Revenue All this makes the $1 trillion, 10-year price tag of health reform very tricky. A good two-thirds of the bill is already paid for: $237 billion would come from fines on employers and individuals who don't comply with new rules to provide or buy health insurance; $525 billion would come from reductions in Medicare payments to private insurers and money ponied up by drug companies (as touted by Obama in a high-profile White House event); and corporate- and foreign-tax changes totaling $37.2 billion...
...plan in the next four years, but that's down from 63% six months ago, and the percentage of doubters has risen from 31% to 39% in that same period, according to a July 22 Associated Press poll. Simply missing the deadline adds to the perception that health-care reform may be stillborn...