As recently as last week, congressional liberals have been saying that republicans don’t have any ideas and therefor have not put any health care legislation on the table. Well, before the August recess, a bill was introduced in the house and is certainly a GOP-sponsored health care reform bill.  While far-from-perfect, it is perhaps the best chance at health care reform out of the three major bills circulating in congress.

So while Nancy Pelosi fights to keep this and the other 33+ that have been submitted by conservatives out of the public light by preventing floor or committee votes, we’ll dig-in and see what they have to offer.

As the bill gets amended, I’ll update this post, but to start, here’s a short, to-the-point summary of 3400.

The bill seems to have several key objectives:

1. Decrease Costs to Consumers
   1. Increase Competition at both the insurance and point-of-care levels
      • HSAs are explicitly listed as acceptable coverage
      • See “Increase Transparency”
   • There are no tax-levying provisions in the bill (no new taxes)
     • Tax credits are given for carrying coverage for those that may need assistance to pay
     • Still allows for the excise tax that has existed since 1986 on employers that offer no coverage
   • Tort reform
     • no limit on economic damages
     • $250,000 limit on non-economic damages
2. Increase Portability
   • Move ownership of coverage to the individual
   • Creates Individual Membership Associations : I believe this is a way to group individuals together to create a larger risk pool through an association-run exchange
   • Allows deductions for premiums paid to individual plans (similar to group plans through employers)
3. Increase Acesss
   • Eliminate coverage limits (no lifetime maximum)
   • Provide coverage for pre-existing conditions
4. Increase Transparency
   • State Transparency Portals that will list quality statistics for hospitals, doctors and facilities as well as their pricing
5. Increase Quality
   • Institutes performance-based quality measures
   • State transparency portals
   • Targeted fund to support Student loans for medical students
   • Loan forgiveness for primary care providers (family doctors)
   • Tracking banned providers across state-lines (fraud and abuse prevention)
6. Explicitly eliminate funding for abortions except in cases of danger to the mother or rape/incest
7. No government intervention into health care benefits
   • No public or government run options of any kind
   • Medicare and Medicaid benefits are not altered
   • No new beuarocracies

Check out the full text of  H.R. 3400 [here] and comment below with what you see (good or bad).

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