House Releases Their Health Reform Starting Point

Today the House released a public document called 'Key Features of the Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives' (.PDF). I have included the full unedited text below. It is of course full of jargonese and code words.

It is also pretty sucky (that too is a code word) as a starting point (being a pessimist I tend to believe it will get weakened, not strengthened as they move forward), even by public option standards, to say nothing of single payer: It uses the 'self-sustaining' and 'level playing field' language that is code for being pre-crippled to not compete with the private for-profit insurance companies. In the insurance market reforms, the 'guaranteed issue' and 'community rating' language is also weaker than it could be.

Given that the House has more real progressives overall (and especially on these committees), and does not have to deal with 60 vote supermajority filibuster threat, their starting point was "expected/supposed" to be much better than this. It seems in some ways weaker, not stronger than Kennedy's Senate HELP Committee version.

More info and details here.

I am still making calls and sending emails. I hope you are as well.