law-of-freedom

Here is a site where you can do a side by side comparison of all the health plans being considered by the Congress. 

http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm#

The plans put forth by Dingell, Sanders, and Conyers provide health insurance to everyone without any premium!  This is ridiculous.  People don't realize they will end up paying for this somehow?  Obama shouldn't be on this list, because he hasn't actually created a plan: he only put forth broad guidelines.  Stark's plan makes a government plan the default healthcare plan.  Ick.  The Senate Finance Committee plan (aka Max Baucus's "America's Healthy Future Act") has nothing good in it, as far as I can tell, and still costs an arm and a leg.  For what?  It's a huge mess.  The remaining plans appear to be salvageable (in other words, they have some good ideas and some ideas that make me scratch my head..and not because my head itches). 

Of note:

Coburn and Price: the only plans that discuss high-deductible coverage, opening the door for health savings accounts and more cost transparency - good - these are also the only two plans that do not have a mandate requiring that everyone have coverage (so how do they intend to solve the problem of people not investing in the system then still expecting care when they need it?);

Wyden/Bennett: requires insurers and providers to publicly report data on medical outcomes, health care quality and costs. I really like anything like this that makes things more transparent and measurable (how else are we going to improve outcomes and costs?). 

• requires hospitals to demonstrate improvements in quality control, including rapid response teams, heart attack treatments, procedures that reduce medication errors, infection prevention, procedures that reduce the incidence of ventilator-related illnesses.
• establishes a website for sharing evidence-based best practices and develop a program for incorporating these best practices into medical school curricula.
• Federal costs would be offset by revenues and savings in first year of full implementation, Thereafter, the bill would be more than self-financing because of indexing growth in the value of the health insurance deduction and the subsidized benefits.