Health Reform: Timeline, Blue Dogs and Taxing Rich Plans

Published On: July 27th, 2009

After a weekend filled with politicos talking about plans to overhaul the health system on Sunday’s news talk shows, here’s a roundup of some of this morning’s reform-related stories:

The timeline for health-care overhaul legislation is still in the spotlight. House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN’s State of the Union over the weekend that she is confident that when she takes the House bill to the floor, it will win. Today, she’s set to resume talks to curb Democratic in-fighting and move the stalled House bill along, according to the Washington Post. But the pivotal group of fiscally conservative Dems known as the Blue Dogs is saying that a vote on the House’s proposal may be delayed until after Labor Day. The WSJ has more on the story of why these Blue Dogs are so powerful. And read more here about Pelosi from Politico.

Taxing health insurer’s most expensive policies, like those of Goldman Sachs’ top executives, is gaining momentum as a way to help pay for health-care reform, according to the New York Times and WSJ. A high-end program like Goldman’s costs the company about $40,000 in premiums per family — compared with a typical employer-sponsored plan that costs $13,000 to $20,000 — and generally has no co-pays or deductibles, says the NYT. But the problem with taxing these plans is that the costs may be passed on to consumers and businesses, notes the WSJ.

And, figuring out who should get subsidies to help lower the costs of buying health insurance is another issue that Congress continues to grapple with, according to the New York Times.

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Children from racial and ethnic minority groups continue to lag behind their white peers on measures of health outcomes. Even among children of similar socioeconomic status, minority children fare worse overall

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Health Reform Poll: Tax the Rich, Don’t Tax Benefits
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Nearly everyone in America should have health insurance. A government-backed plan should compete against private insurers ..
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If the government’s health care costs are high and rising, and you extend subsidized health insurance to millions more people without fundamentally changing the system, you’re going to put the government on the hook for a lot more money. Douglas Elmendorf, the guy who heads the Congressional Budget Office, made that point yesterday and became..
Senate Mulls Laundry List of Tax Hikes to Fund Health Reform
The Senate Finance Committee today released a list of proposals it’s considering to help pay for health reform. A lot of them either scale back tax advantages or increased taxes directly. Aside from some ideas that have been bandied about already, such as taxing employee health benefits and sugary drinks , some proposals that caught..
The Unintended Consequences of Taxing Health Benefits
Taxing employed-sponsored health benefits, an idea getting a lot of attention as a way to help pay for the health-care overhaul, may lead to intended consequences, James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council and John Sweeney , president of the AFL-CIO, argue in a Washington Post op-ed today. The pair say that with such..

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