NYT Editorial on HCR w/some explanations:

[rasputin1952]

The Next Step on Health Reform

The Senate’s passage of a heath care reform bill over lockstep Republican opposition required every single member of the Democratic caucus to vote to override Republican filibusters. It will take equal political will to fuse the Senate’s bill with the more expansive reform approved by the House and enact a final version.

The House bill was approved by 220 to 215, and the Senate bill passed with 60 votes, the minimum needed to defeat a filibuster. The risk is that anything that upsets the balance of compromises in either chamber could doom the effort.

The Senate bill seems especially fragile. Senators — especially self-styled moderates — will have to forswear the posturing that weakened and almost derailed their bill. It is time to put the public interest first, because there are valuable features in each bill that warrant inclusion in the final product. The House bill, which is superior in many critical respects, does a better job of making health insurance affordable; the Senate bill has stronger provisions to restrain escalating medical costs.

•


The basic framework of the bills is the same. Both would require everyone to obtain health insurance — and all employers to provide it — or pay a penalty. Both would set up insurance exchanges on which small businesses and people who buy their own health insurance could choose from an array of private plans (but perhaps not a public plan, the way the winds are blowing).

Both would provide subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance on the exchanges and expand Medicaid to help the poorest. Both would impose new rules on insurance companies and force them to accept all applicants without regard to pre-existing conditions. Both would begin to move Medicare, and through its example the entire health care system, away from wasteful fee-for-service medicine toward coordinated delivery systems that improve quality and lower costs.

<snip> (Some insights/explanations)

The final shape of the legislation will be constrained by costs and politics. Conventional wisdom holds that the final product will have to be close to the Senate version lest that fragile 60-vote coalition be ruptured. The Senate bill as it stands is a big improvement over the status quo, but if lawmakers truly want to serve their constituents rather than play more politics, they would include some provisions from the House bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/opinion/27sun1.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print


Select Editorials on Health Care

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/opinion/editorials/select-health-care-editorials/index.html

[ixion]

1. The basic framework of the bills is the same.

To provide a bailout vehicle and subsequent revenue stream to insurance companies. :grr: