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To hear some Democrats tell it over the weekend, the health-care overhaul has already passed Congress, leaving just some procedural matters to wrap up before the changes begin.

“Health-care reform has already passed both the House and the Senate with not only a majority in the Senate but a supermajority. And we’re not talking about changing any rules here,” White House adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle says in the Washington Post this morning.

Some obese children as young as 3 years old have elevated levels of a marker that is linked to heart disease in later life, a new study says.

The clock is running out before a 21% cut in Medicare payments to doctors kicks in. Plans to block the reductions have gotten hung up in Congress.

President Obama plans to carry a proposal — an attempt to bridge differences between bills passed by the House and Senate last year — into a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders on Thursday. WSJ’s Janet Adamy discusses the latest.

See the original post:  News Hub: Prospects for Obama’s Health Proposal/a>

President Obama has juggled the health-overhaul plans approved by the House and the Senate and added some twists of his own to come up with a White House proposal he hopes can win enough support for passage in both chambers.

The Obama plan is crafted mainly from the Senate-passed bill, but not entirely. Here are some of the big points in the proposal, as posted on the White House Web site:

President Obama is making headway on coming up with a single Democratic overhaul proposal before next week’s televised health summit with Republicans, according to reports this morning.

The presidential plan is supposed to be posted on the Internet by Monday, which — given the differences between the bills already passed by House and Senate Democrats — is taking some doing. Nonetheless, “There will be one proposal” with “some of the best ideas” form both bills, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said yesterday.

Billy Tauzin — the former Louisiana congressman who stuck with the homespun phrases even as he pulled down $2 million a year to represent the drug industry in DC — is stepping down as the head of PhRMA, the big trade group.

The WSJ notes that he was criticized “for his support of the White House’s now-teetering plan to overhaul health care.”

Hard to believe, but it was just weeks ago that everybody was busy hashing out the last-minute nitty gritty of what the Dems’ final health-care bill would look like.

Now, in a 59-41 world, President Obama’s call for a televised bipartisan discussion of health care — a proposal that’s reasonable enough, but pretty dull and process-y — passes for big news on the health-care overhaul front.

It’s still unclear what the Dems are going to do about the health-care overhaul, now that they’ve lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. So much of the health coverage this morning (including the lead stories in the WSJ and New York Times) keys on an interview President Obama gave to ABC News on Wednesday.

Here’s a passage from the interview that gets lots of play in the morning news:

Walgreens is threatening to stop filling Medicaid prescriptions at 64 of its 121 pharmacies in Washington state because of state cuts in payments.

Walgreens, the biggest drug-store chain in the country, has been down this road before. It threatened to pull out of Medicaid programs last year before settlements were reached in Delaware and in an earlier dust-up in Washington state.