Two of the three House committees—Energy and Commerce and Education and Labor—that unveiled an 852-page healthcare reform draft last week will go into full gear today with their own public hearings on healthcare reform; the third committee, Ways and Means, will begin hearings on Wednesday.
While the hearings are separate, the committees are deliberately moving together to create a reform bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) predicted last week will be ready in the House by the end of July—complete with some type of public insurance option. "I feel confident that what we put together will be reconcilable . . . with the Senate," she said at a news conference.
"When the three of [those House committees] work together, they are one bill," said Julius Hobson, a senior policy advisor at Bryan Cave LLP, in Washington, DC. This will be significant when they start looking at financing the reform measure—now estimated at about $1 trillion over a 10-year period.
About 14-15 years ago, when the Clinton administration was pushing for healthcare reform on Capitol Hill, the House side had four primary oversight committees and seven secondary committees "that all got a piece of the bill," Hobson said. "Which is one of the things that you knew was going to kill [the bill]."
Moving today toward this unified structure might make it easier for legislation to be approved. "The three primary committees are the only committees. They worked together. They drafted the bill together," Hobson said. "So if there is any paring back, they can work together to make that happen."
The House bill, written basically without Republican input, includes provisions for an insurance exchange with a public option, requires all Americans to purchase health insurance, provides small business credits, and enhances prevention and wellness programs.
Meanwhile, on the Senate side, hearings on the proposed bill are continuing in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee; however, the previous end of week deadline for bill passage for that committee is gone.
"We won't get the whole bill done" before the July 4 recess, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D MD), said Monday after an afternoon spent working on prevention issues. The most quarrelsome issue—creation of a public plan that would compete again private plans—still remained incomplete as the hearings resume today.
The Senate Finance Committee apparently is the only one of the five committees specifically developing a bill with the aim of bipartisan support. "We will get a bipartisan agreement," Baucus said on Monday.
Baucus, though, has indicated that he planned to meet behind closed doors today with a group of senators he's calling the "coalition of the willing." Those involved include top committee Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa; Republicans Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Olympia Snowe of Maine; and Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
President Obama dismissed those who have expressed skepticism that the nation's healthcare system will be overhauled by Congress this year, saying "yes we can" revise it. In an appearance in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Obama praised an agreement reached by drug companies to help close a cap in Medicare's prescription drug coverage. He said the pharmaceutical industry's pledge to spend $80 billion over the next decade to reduce the cost of drugs would pay for a portion of his healthcare plan.
While The White House hailed what it described as a "historic agreement to lower drugs costs" for older Americans, it was not immediately clear how much the government would reap in savings that could be used to pay for coverage of the uninsured. As part of the agreement, pharmaceutical companies promised to help narrow a gap in Medicare coverage of prescription drugs that is known as the doughnut hole.
A few dozen supporters, including health bloggers, individual physicians, startups, and Microsoft, have formed a group seeking to inject the rights of patients into the Obama administration's multibillion-dollar drive to computerize medical records. The group's effort begins with a Web site, HealthDataRights.org. The supporters all share the view that informed, motivated patients must play a much greater role in managing their own health if the policy goals of improving the quality of care and curbing costs are to be achieved. And, they add, health information technology, when used wisely, can help.
A proposal in the Senate to limit tax deductions for medical costs would fall hardest on middle-income taxpayers who are uninsured and who come up against expensive health problems. Currently, a taxpayer may claim a deduction for medical or dental expenses only to the extent those costs exceed 7.5% of the person's adjusted gross income. Senate negotiators are discussing raising that threshold to 10%, in effect denying deductions for many taxpayers who could claim them today.
Some governors are pushing to scale back or kill proposals to expand Medicaid to provide healthcare coverage to the uninsured, raising a new challenge to President Barack Obama's effort to overhaul the system. Medicaid is funded through a combination of federal and state tax money. Proposals in the House and Senate would expand the program to cover at least a third of the nation's 46 million uninsured, but states are worried they would get stuck with a big part of the tab.
The Louisiana State University System Board of Supervisors rejected the draft governing agreement for a proposed teaching hospital in New Orleans, instead endorsing a revised model that board members said would give LSU more influence over the enterprise. The next step in the governance wrangling is not clear, given that Tulane University's governing board approved the original draft agreement in its own special meeting a day after state Health Secretary Alan Levine pitched the deal as the product of intense private negotiations between the two schools.
Orthopedic product maker Synthes Inc. handpicked surgeons and paid for the doctors' travel to training sessions where company employees explained how to use their new bone-mending cement to fix a type of spinal fracture that afflicts hundreds of thousands of people yearly, most of them elderly. Federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment of the company that these training sessions were a dangerous, illegal, and less expensive substitute for clinical trials required by the Food and Drug Administration. Synthes has said it acted properly and will defend itself against the charges.
Rick Scott was ousted as the chief executive of Nashville-based Columbia/HCA more than a decade ago, and he is getting a lot of buzz these days. Scott has emerged as a spokesman for a group fighting government-run healthcare in the reform efforts being debated in Congress. While critics cite Scott's past as a reason not to take him seriously, others say that his vast knowledge of the healthcare system makes him more qualified than most people to weigh in on the debate.
Palm Bay (FL) Hospital has opened a new 127,000-square-foot, $75 million expansion that doubles the size of the hospital. The expansion increases the hospital's bed capacity from 60 to 152, with all-new, private inpatient beds. In addition, a new intensive care unit with an eICU program, which allows critical care monitoring from a remote centralized operations center, was added.
