Health Reform: But What Will Senate Finance Bill Say?

If the government’s health care costs are high and rising, and you extend subsidized health insurance to millions more people without fundamentally changing the system, you’re going to put the government on the hook for a lot more money.

Douglas Elmendorf, the guy who heads the Congressional Budget Office, made that point yesterday and became the lead health-reform story of the day. (See coverage from the WSJ, Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico.)

But Elmendorf made clear he wasn’t referring to the bill expected any day now from the Senate Finance Committee, because leaders of the panel “have not yet released” that bill. Two other bills — one from the House and one from the Senate health committee — have been in the news this week.

All along, the conventional wisdom has been that the key health reform bill would come from Senate Finance. Max Baucus, the moderate Dem who chairs the committee, has said he wants a bipartisan bill, and he’s been working closely with Chuck Grassley, the committee’s ranking Republican — suggesting that the bill may be closer to the political center than the bills we’ve seen so far.

But the committee hasn’t been able to get a deal worked out, and said yesterday that they wouldn’t have anything until next week. So we’ll have to wait a bit more to see what the committee comes up with — and how it plays with the all-important CBO.

Source: blogs.wsj.com/