The US Senate Finance Committee wrapped up debate yesterday on a massive overhaul of the US healthcare system and prepared to vote on the legislation next week.
“We can be proud of what we’ve done here,” committee Chairman Max Baucus said as the panel completed the amendment process and set a vote for next week.
The panel is awaiting an official cost estimate on the roughly US$900 billion measure before sending it to the full Senate.
PHOTO: AFP
The bill calls for sweeping insurance market reforms and seeks to rein in soaring medical costs and expand coverage to millions of uninsured people.
US President Barack Obama praised the panel’s work.
“We are now closer than ever before to finally passing reform that will offer security to those who have coverage and affordable insurance to those who don’t,” he said in a statement.
In its seventh day of debate, the committee moved to try to make the medical coverage people will be required to purchase more affordable. It also changed the proposed tax on high-cost insurance policies to provide for more generous plans for retirees and workers in high-risk professions before the tax kicks in.
The bill would impose a 40 percent excise tax on insurance plans in excess of US$8,000 for individuals and US$21,000 for families. An amendment approved on a 13-10 party line vote raises those levels for retirees and high-risk professions, such as coal miners, to US$9,850 and US$26,000 respectively.
The panel also voted 12 to 11, mostly along party lines, in favor of a proposal by Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell that would allow states to negotiate deals with healthcare plans for those on low incomes.
Healthcare reform is Obama’s top domestic priority and the Senate Finance Committee is the last of five congressional committees to complete its work on the overhaul. The bill will be merged with one approved earlier by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee before it is taken to the full Senate later this month.
The proposal would create state-based exchanges where individuals without employer-sponsored coverage and small businesses could shop for insurance. But the exchanges would not include a government-run plan or “public option” backed by many Democrats. Instead, the committee’s bill would create nonprofit insurance cooperatives to create competition.
The US healthcare industry, however, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Obama.
Supporters of radical reform of healthcare say legislation emerging from the US Senate reflects the financial power of vested interests — principally insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and hospitals — that have worked to stop major changes threatening their profits.
The industry and interest groups have spent US$380 million in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying and advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totaling close to US$1.5 million, has gone to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate committee drafting the new law.
Drug and insurance companies say they are merely seeking to educate politicians and the public. But with industry lobbyists swarming over Capitol Hill — there are six registered healthcare lobbyists for every member of Congress — a partner in the most powerful lobbying firm in Washington acknowledged that healthcare firms’ money “has had a lot of influence” and that it is “morally suspect.”
Reform groups say vast spending, and the threat of a lot more being poured into ads against the administration, has helped drug firms ensure there will be no cap on the prices they charge for medicines.
“It’s a total victory for the health insurance industry,” said Steffie Woolhander, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program. “What the bill has done is use the coercive power of the state to force people to hand their money over to a private entity which is the private insurance industry. That is not what people were promised.”
The health industry permeates the process in other ways. At Baucus’s side, drafting much of the wording of the reform, was Liz Fowler, a Senate committee counsel whose last position was vice-president of the US’ largest health insurer, Wellpoint.
Baucus declines to discuss donations but told Montana’s Missoulian newspaper this year that “no one gets special treatment.”
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