News/Commentary

If you got lost in the maze back there with the “public option” debate, The Economist, in a few crisply-written paragraphs, will help you catch up on health care reform painlessly.

We recommend painless whenever possible. Please read the whole piece.

The Economist

…”Completion of work on the bill is by no means a formality, though it does now look more or less certain that the Senate will vote the bill out before Christmas. The next difficulty will come in producing a single “reconciled” version from the very different bills that the Senate and House have produced; that reconciled bill then has to go back for final clearance by both chambers. The public option is one big stumbling block. It is clear that the Senate cannot pass any version of a bill that contains a public option, so the House will have to give ground, which is going to require a lot of presidential arm-twisting in January. And the two bills are funded in very different ways, one with a tax on the rich, the other with an insurance-policy surcharge. As of today though, health-care reform, expensive and imperfect though it is, is looking a lot more likely.”

Source: The Economist, Online, December 21, 2009