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Thinking About Wyden-Bennett
The Glittering Eye — ... For a more detailed description, analysis, and critique of the plan see here. The critique portion suggests that the plan be amended to reduce adverse selection by precluding high-deductible options, give more guarantees to Medicaid and SCHIP recipients, and increase subsidies to low- and moderate-income individuals. As I read the tealeaves that would eviscerate the plans cost-saving measures. ...

Psstt! Mr. President, We Have A Health Reform Plan For You
The Moderate Voice — ... incorporate a few Wyden-Bennett ideas, there is stiff resistance to the aspects that fundamentally change incentives. Mr. President, we think you are a rational man. Okay, let’s take up Brooks’ offer. The Washington think-tank Center on Budget and Priorities gives the Wyden-Bennett bill good marks in addressing the 46 million without health insurance and the eroding decline of employer-based coverage which insures about 59% of all Americans. The report, in part, says: The Wyden-Bennett plan seeks to achieve universal coverage by ...

Is Wyden The Savior Of Health Care Reform?
Wonk Room — ... be able to purchase coverage at a community rating. Under the plan, insured Americans would have a choice: they could either continue purchasing coverage from their employer or find a plan in the new exchanges. Employers would have to contribute to the costs of insurance on a sliding scale and could continue offering health care coverage to their employees. Significantly, “employers that were providing health insurance before implementation of the Wyden-Bennett plan would be required to “cash out” their previous contributions to the health insurance sots of ...

Brooks Pushes Wyden-Bennett…Again
The Glittering Eye — ... It has bi-partisan support. See above. It achieves universal coverage within the margin of error. Unlike the approaches favored by the Congressional leadership, it has received high marks from the CBO and the Joint Commission on Taxation. Everybody wins! It accomplishes both universal coverage and cost control. Healthcare reform is too important to be left in the hands of partisan bickering to score partisan points. Here’s a summary of Wyden-Bennett. I’ve already made my comments on it—I don’t ...

Is the Senate Health Care Bill Better Off Dead?
Opinionator — ... when the final bill is produced. I like the fact that the administration is much more conscious of keeping the deficit in line than any earlier set of health reformers. I like the fact that they have taken every delivery reform in existence and thrown it into the bill. On the other hand, they have not fundamentally changed the fee for service system, which is the cancer at the heart of health care inflation. I understand why they didn’t touch it with a root and branch reform like Wyden-Bennett . It would have been disruptive — politically, it would have been murder. But it ...