House passes health care reform, 219-212

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Last night the House voted, 219-212, to approve the Senate’s version of health care reform, clearing the way for legislation to proceed to the president’s desk.

“For most Americans this debate has never been about abstractions — the fight between right and left, Republicans and Democrats — it’s always been about something far more personal,” President Obama said after the House passed the bill.

The House also approved a set of “fixes” to the Senate bill; Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev) has assured the House leadership that more than 51 Senators will pass the same fixes using the Senate’s reconciliation rules.
 
“Takeaway” Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich says it was a weekend of “horse trading” and wrangling for lawmakers, leading up to the final vote on Sunday night.

For Americans the impact of the bill is, as President Obama said, personal.

“I will be interested to see how the bill could affect me, as a physician,” said a pediatrician in Oklahoma. “I would like to see it make it easier for people to get insured. But I don’t know that it will do that. Most of the physicians I work with are very confused about what the end result of this is going to be, and we don’t have a sense of what is going to happen. But if the intention of the bill … is to make it easier for people to get insured, then we’re happy.”

If doctors sound confused, the average American is even more so, says Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor at the “Columbia Journalism Review.”

“People really don’t know what’s in this bill, they don’t know how it will affect them,” said Lieberman. “The media hasn’t been telling them and neither have the politicians. This thing really came down to a lot of slogans.”

Lieberman says most Americans won’t see a lot of change in their health care in the immediate future. People who have employer-provided insurance will keep that insurance, but they should expect their premiums to go up. And those in the individual market won’t see subsidized coverage until 2014.

There is one exception, says Lieberman. “There is about five billion dollars that Congress is going to put into these high-risk pools that many states have, that will allow some people right now who have pre-existing conditions, who do not have access to coverage because they’re sick, to go to these risk pools and get coverage.”

But the glitch with the risk pool: actuaries say the money will run out in the next year.

Nevertheless, there hasn’t been a health care expansion like this since Medicare was passed in 1965, says Lieberman, and the passage of the health care bill is a “momentous” event.

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