The Senate is set to begin debate on its health-overhaul bill, with Democrats and Republicans planning to offer amendments on divisive subjects such as abortion and taxes that could hamper passage of the bill. The debate is expected to last at least several weeks. Democrats would like to pass a bill by Christmas, but have yet to find a formula that can win 60 votes, the number required to conclude debate. Lawmakers from both parties are planning to introduce dozens of amendments, addressing issues from a government-run healthcare plan to medical malpractice lawsuits to abortion and taxes, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Measured against the promises President Obama and congressional Democrats have made about healthcare reform, the bill the Senate begins debating this week could be setting Americans up for disappointment, the Washington Post reports. Some of the main reforms would not take place for several years, and even when they do, some observers say, the bill does too little to make sure they would be enforced, the Post reports.
Experts remain deeply divided over whether healthcare legislation would rein in soaring healthcare costs or simply add millions of people to a system that is already driving the nation toward bankruptcy, the Washington Post reports. Optimists say the $848 billion package drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-NV) contains promising ideas for transforming the healthcare system and encouraging doctors and hospitals to work more efficiently. They say it would eventually reduce both private premiums and the swelling cost of government healthcare for the elderly and poor. But opponents see scant evidence that those ideas would quickly bear fruit, and in the short term they fear that the initiative would leave Washington struggling to pay for a new $200 billion-a-year health program even as existing programs require vast infusions of cash to care for the aging population, the Post reports.
A handful of Democratic senators are pushing to change pending healthcare legislation so that it would help increase the country's stock of primary-care doctors due to warnings that the bill may exacerbate the difficulty some Americans already have in finding a doctor. More than 30 million Americans would get health insurance under the healthcare overhaul that passed through the House and a similar bill moving forward in the Senate. If that happens, many previously uninsured people who haven't had a regular doctor before will need a primary-care physician. But pressure to keep down the legislation's cost led Democrats to exclude one way of alleviating the projected physician shortage, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In the healthcare bill being debated in the Senate, a tax—which would be paid by the customer but collected by doctors—would be levied on any cosmetic surgery that is not necessary to address deformities arising from congenital abnormalities, personal injuries resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring diseases. The proposal has outraged plastic surgeons, who say they are being singled out because of an outdated perception that people who have cosmetic procedures are well-to-do.
The Chinese government launched a three-year, 850-billion-yuan ($124-billion) effort earlier this year to rebuild the country's crumbling healthcare system. China once provided rudimentary but universal care to everyone, but as the country shifted from socialism to a market economy over the past 30 years, healthcare frayed, the Associated Press reports. Medical costs soared faster than incomes, and treatment today depends on one's ability to pay. Nearly a third of the poor say that health is the most important cause of their poverty, according to the World Health Organization.