House health reform bill passes, now what?

by CHARLES FIEGL on 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:

  1. The House bill doesn't include a Medicare "doc fix" that eliminates the SGR, and
  2. 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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