Health Care Reform Passed the House

Holy wow. It’s been a long fight already and it’s not over yet, but health care reform took a big step forward Saturday night when the House of Representatives voted 220 to 215 to pass H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been taking just a couple days to say, well, holy wow. It’s not that I didn’t think it would happen, I just didn’t realize how momentous it would feel.

In a system that is so broken and needs so much fixing, this bill:

It will end the national scandal of medical bankruptcy—the number one cause of personal bankruptcy—by eliminating lifetime caps on insurer payments and limiting annual out-of-pocket costs. Medical bankruptcies affect up to 4,000 families every day in the United States—and 78 percent of them are fully insured.

It ends abusive insurance company practices, including the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions and “rescissions”—the practice of canceling coverage when patients file claims.

It provides subsidies to help middle-class and lower-income families afford coverage.

Through an exchange, it offers people a wide range of choices of insurance, including a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.

It narrows the “donut hole”—the gap in Medicare coverage for prescription drugs.

It creates incentives to increase the number of doctors and boosts funding for community health centers.

It allows young people to be covered by their parents’ insurance up to age 27.

It creates a new fund to help employers give health coverage to early retirees.

It provides for efficient, computerized medical records and other tools to streamline medical care and increase quality.

It cuts costs to the federal government as well as to families, reducing the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years—thanks, in part, to the existence of a public health insurance option, which lowers costs across the system.

Ad it’s fairly funded—through employer responsibility and a surtax on the very highest earners, not a tax on middle-class health benefits.

That’s huge. But while I’ve stopped to absorb the House’s vote, I know we’re not done yet. We have to keep fighting if we’re going to make all this a reality.

As mcjoan said at Daily Kos:

This is the first time a chamber of Congress has passed healthcare reform since Medicare was enacted. There’s a lot of work left to do on this, and a lot of ugly to be undone, but we made it this far against long odds. Now the really hard work: the Senate.

Thank your representative in the House if he or she voted for H.R. 3962. And then call your senator and tell him or her we need an equivalent bill to pass the Senate.