A Day in My Life

For my first installment on the ever important and timely topic of health care reform, I wanted to give you all some of the facts on the bills that have currently past congressional committees. Rather than write out the details of each of the plans in paragraph form, I have found a handy table created by the Wall Street Journal that does it way better job than I could. You can view this table by simply clicking on the image below.

This table is a great resource and will hopefully help you compare and contrast each of the pending bills. While this isn’t an exhaustive table of all of the elements of the bill, it does highlight the most discussed and contentious issues of each of the bills. I hope you will use it as as reference to come back to when considering reform and as the legislation moves through congress.

I also wanted to quickly address the process for those who may not follow legislation. As I mentioned earlier, these bills have all only passed congressional committees. There are currently two bills that have passed senate committees and three bill that have passed committees in the house. The two committees in the senate who oversee health care and have passed bills are the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Senator Max Baucus and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chaired by Senator Tom Harkin. The committees in the house that have passed health reform legislation are the House Ways and Means Committee chaired by Rep. Charles Rangel, the House Energy and Commerce Committee chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman and the House Education and Labor Committee chaired by Rep. George Miller. Now that these bills have all passed in their respective committees, they are now brought to the full House or Senate and combined into one bill in each chamber. Once the committee bills are combined, they are then debated and amended by their respective chamber, the full House or the full Senate, and voted upon. To pass the House, a bill must receive 218 votes which is a simply majority. In the Senate, however, a bill must receive 60 votes to pass. There are currently 60 democratic senators which is considered a super-majority as a bill can pass with only members of one party voting in favor. (To arrive at 60, there technically are only 58 democratic senators and two independent senators who caucus with with democrats. Also, this is the regular legislative process and doesn’t include the process under budget reconciliation rules.)

Once the bills pass both chambers of Congress, they are then brought to a conference committee made up of members of both the House and the Senate. At this point, the two bills that were passed are different and the conference committee works to meld these bills into one bill which is sent back to each chamber. When the bill arrives back in each chamber in it’s final form, it is then voted on again by each chamber and passed on the same number of votes as referenced above. Once the bill passes both chambers of congress, you guessed it, it will finally go to President Obama to sign. Needless to say, the legislation that has currently passed each committee is subject to a lot of changes in the coming weeks and months.

Your reward for making it this far in my post is a fun video you may have seen in grade school. Yes, here is the famous School House Rock video on the legislative process. Enjoy:

(If you are viewing this in Facebook, click the “View Original Post” link below to read the full post and view the video.)

Unless you have been living in a hole recently, you have heard plenty about, and are probably sick of, the health care debate. Talk about health care is everywhere you look. Every news source, whether online or on TV, regularly talks about the current state of health care and what is currently being debated to deal with the problems. I am like you and have been completely overloaded with all the coverage of the debate. It is hard to keep track of everything that is going on in the debate.

In order to bring some more structure and clarity, I am diving into the debate. Over time, I am going to try to sum up each the bills currently working their way through congress and list out the key provisions of each. Then, I will give my thoughts on each of the plans and will eventually list out what I would like to see in a final bill. Being that I am just a guy in the Twin Cities, I don’t expect any of my thoughts to sway anyone in power or close to the real debate in Washington. I only hope that my ramblings will help you straighten out the bills as they move through congress and give you another perspective on the whole debate. For easy reference to all my posts on this topic, I have created a “Special Topics” section on the right side of my blog. You can quickly reference my posts on this topic by clicking on Health Care. Please leave me your comments on any of my posts. Hopefully I can spark some good discussion on the issue.

If you are viewing my posts on Facebook, click on the “View Original Post” link at the bottom of the post to go back to my blog. It will be easier to leave your comments on my blog rather than Facebook in order to keep everyone’s ideas together.

Enjoy!