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Health Reform puts American families and small business owners in control of their own health care.

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Sun, 02/21/2010 - 23:46 — rroberts

Find out what health care reform means for you.Over the past year the House and the Senate have been working on an effort to provide health insurance reform that lowers costs, guarantees choices, and enhances quality health care for all Americans. Building on that year-long effort, the President's final legislation included the best ideas from both sides of the aisle offered in the course of the debate. 

Health reform will make health care more affordable, make health insurers more accountable, expand health coverage to all Americans, and make the health system sustainable, stabilizing family budgets, the Federal budget, and the economy: 

  • It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today.  This helps 32 million Americans afford health care who do not get it today – and makes coverage more affordable for many more.  Under the plan, 95% of Americans will be insured.
  • It sets up a new competitive health insurance market giving millions of Americans the same choices of insurance that members of Congress will have.  
  • It brings greater accountability to health care by laying out commonsense rules of the road to keep premiums down and prevent insurance industry abuses and denial of care.  
  • It will end discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions.
  • It puts our budget and economy on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years – and more than $1 trillion over the second decade – by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse.

Key Provisions in Health Reform:

Health reform built off of the legislation that passed the Senate and improves on it by bridging key differences between the House and the Senate and includes several key Republican provisions.

One key improvement, for example, is eliminating the Nebraska FMAP provision and providing significant additional Federal financing to all States for the expansion of Medicaid.  For America’s seniors, the reform completely closes the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole” coverage gap.  It strengthens the Senate bill’s provisions that make insurance affordable for individuals and families, including protections for out-of-pocket costs, while also strengthening the provisions to fight fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid to save taxpayer dollars.  The threshold for the excise tax on the most expensive health plans will be raised from $23,000 for a family plan to $27,500 and will start in 2018 for all such plans. 

Summaries of Key Elements of Health Reform: