House health reform bill passes, now what?

by: CHARLES FIEGL Nov 10, 2009

Yes, there was some health care reform news over the weekend. The House passed its health bill by a slim 220-215 vote.

Two things of note:

The House bill doesn't include a Medicare "doc fix" that eliminates the SGR, and
A final bill out of Congress, if it ever gets out of Congress, will most likely differ somewhere between moderately-to-greatly from the House version.

The Senate still needs to pass a health care spending plan. If the Senate passes a bill, it will be merged with the House bill by a committee of House and Senate lawmakers.

There's still a lot of work ahead. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will push forward with health reform when he has the 60 votes to cleanly pass the bill. He'll apparently try to bring the bill up for a vote before Thanksgiving, but that seems ambitious right now. A week ago Reid indicated a vote might not happen until 2010.

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