President Obama’s Agenda for Health Care

The Obama-Biden Health Care Plan focuses on building and improving employer based health coverage, improving the relationship between patient and doctor by working with existing providers, doctors, and plans to ensure that patients have an audible voice in their health care. The plan attempts to refocus who should really be prospering from health care–the American people and not just insurance and drug companies.

Some of the changes the plan calls for include:  requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, proving a Small Business Health Tax Credit to aid small businesses in providing affordable coverage, establishing a National Health Insurance Exchange that offers a variety of affordable, comprehensive private insurance plans, reduce drug costs, and require hospitals to collect and report data related to health care cost and quality.

President Obama’s website states that ” Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year”, and that he “will pay for his $50 – $65 billion health care reform effort by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year and retaining the estate tax at its 2009 level”.

To read more, please visit:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/health_care/

Health Care ‘Reform’ Is Not Enough

Is our current health care system ‘healthy’? Is there a future for women’s health? Where does health fall on the activist agenda?
Susan Yanow offers some points for readers to ponder. Yanow argues that too much of the health care system is driven by cost and profit, that health care for all individuals is a basic human right and that women deserve a seat at the table to weigh-in on health care reform at all levels of government, local, state and federal.

To read more, please visit:
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2009winter/2009winter_2.php

Medicaid, COBRA Provisions Under Economic Stimulus Package Expand Health Care Coverage

The proposal put forth by House Democrats called for an increase in aid to workers recently laid off through an expansion of Medicaid or increase in COBRA subsidies. If enacted, the federal government would cover the cost of all benefits, including administrative costs, for all unemployed Medicaid beneficiaries through 2010. Urban Institute Health policy researcher Stan Dorn said that even with the COBRA subsidies, the high health insurance premiums might still be financially out of reach for some residents. The Post describes the proposal as “bold” and that “including insurance help for the unemployed in a fast-acting economic stimulus package is part of a strategy by congressional Democrats and [President Obama] to place attention on health care right away”.

To read more, please visit:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/health2008dr.cfm?DR_ID=56533