Word: baucus
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...Baucus, the Senate's point man on health care, sounds supremely confident when he talks about the odds that Congress will pass its most sweeping piece of social legislation since the New Deal. "Meaningful, comprehensive health-care legislation passes this year. That's a given," he declares, sipping a bottle of water in his functionally furnished hideaway office just steps from the Senate chamber. "It's gonna pass. It's gonna happen. There's no doubt about...
...rest of us might be forgiven if we view Baucus' prediction with a little more skepticism. After all, universal health care is a cause that comes around every 15 or 20 years in Washington, and Presidents as far back as Woodrow Wilson have tried and failed to make it happen. The last big effort, in 1993 and 1994, was a political disaster that set Bill Clinton's presidency back a year or more. (Watch a video about a woman living without health insurance...
...from unions that have given up wage gains in favor of health benefits in recent rounds of negotiations. There is also the inconvenient fact that Obama attacked John McCain in last year's election for proposing exactly such a tax on something workers believe they get for free. Still, Baucus says, "Not all those benefits should be tax-free. The bulk should be tax-free, but not all of them. That's part of the solution." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...there is an ideal out there, Baucus says, it can be seen in the kind of medicine already being practiced by Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare and Geisinger Health System, which manage to hold down costs and get better results. Their operations have fostered closer teamwork among care providers. Also important will be electronic record-keeping that saves time and avoids errors, and comparative-effectiveness research that gives doctors and patients a better sense of which treatments work best. And a reformed health-care system would put more emphasis on preventive care and managing such chronic conditions...
...coverage to people who now have trouble buying it because they have pre-existing health conditions. It also puts more emphasis on preventive care and sets up "state exchanges" - similar to the one now operating in Massachusetts - in which individuals and families could comparison-shop for insurance plans. (Read "Baucus Predicts GOP Votes for Health Care Reform...