Thaindian News

By Arun Kumar
Washington, Oct 14 (IANS) President Barack Obama’s plans for universal health care coverage got a boost with an $829 billion plan projected to extend coverage to an additional 29 million Americans clearing a key congressional committee.

“We are now closer than ever before to passing health reform, but we’re not there yet,” Obama told reporters in the White House Rose Garden Tuesday.

“Now’s not the time to pat ourselves on the back.”

Instead, he said, it is time to “dig in and work even harder to get this done”. Obama singled out Republican Olympia Snowe “for both the political courage and the seriousness of purpose that she’s demonstrated throughout this process”.

Snowe was the lone Senate Finance Committee’s member to cross party lines, breaking with other Republicans to vote for the measure. All the committee’s Democrats supported the bill. The panel passed its long-awaited plan Tuesday with a 14-9 vote.

The bill would subsidise insurance for poorer Americans, establish non-profit health care cooperatives, and create health insurance exchanges to make it easier for small groups and individuals to purchase coverage.

Among other things, it would cap annual out-of-pocket expenses and prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The plan is financed by a combination of reductions in spending for Medicare and other government programmes, as well as higher taxes on expensive insurance policies and new fees on the health industry.

The Finance Committee was the last of five congressional panels to consider health care legislation before formal debate begins in the full House and Senate.

Democratic leaders in each chamber have now started the politically delicate task of melding together five pieces of legislation - two in the Senate and three in the House.

Last week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the Finance Committee’s bill would cut the national deficit by roughly $80 billion over the next 10 years while expanding coverage to 94 percent of the country’s non-elderly population.