Selected stories from the daily newsletter CQ HealthBeat from the week of December 14, 2009. Provided as a service under rights licensed by The Commonwealth Fund. The full-text version of this newsletter is available in the Health Reform section of
commonwealthfund.org.
The Senate voted by a margin of 60 to 40 early this morning to shut off debate on a package of revisions negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. to the Senate Democratic health care overhaul bill (HR 3590). Read more »
Senate Democratic leaders offered a package of final changes to their health care overhaul that represented a major concession to centrists in the party.
Read more »
Democratic senators traveled to the White House for a meeting with President Obama aimed at building a united front on health care, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman said he'd likely join with them in backing a measure that dropped a government-sponsored insurance program. Read more »
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a strong advocate of including a government-run insurance plan in health care legislation, indicated she may not insist on including such a plan in the final version of the bill. Read more »
Liberals need not lament the fate of a public plan in health care. Experts say that creating insurance "exchanges" that offer a menu of competing plans would do a better job of controlling premium costs in any case. But lawmakers writing the details of the exchange provisions in the health care overhaul should be worried nonetheless. The way they design exchanges will have to be bulletproof—because insurers don't like them and are aces at killing them off. Read more »
House passage of a defense spending measure averting—if only briefly—a 21 percent cut in Medicare physician payments drew praise from lobbies representing seniors and doctors, but they urged lawmakers to do much more on the payment issue. Read more »