Author Archives: Rachel Friedlander

Throughout this campaign season, Democrats up and down the ticket generally agreed about the need for drastic reform of the health care insurance and delivery system in the United States.    From the get-go, President Obama has expressed his commitment to health care reform as a major priority in his administration, but now that he has taken office, it remains to be seen what that reform will look like, and the debate is already heating up.

Many members of Congress, such as Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) and Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), have been vocal supporters of national health insurance, each introducing their own comprehensive bills in the past few years.  But there are other members that prefer a more incremental shift.   House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) appeared on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” yesterday, stating that:

“If you take what we’ve done with [the State Children's Health Insurance Program bill] and then you follow with [more spending] on community health centers, you would have gone a long way to building a foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.  I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go out and just bite something you can’t chew. We’ve been down that road. I still remember 1994.”

There is also another major proposal, a voucher system, which has been strongly supported by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (and brother of White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel), which gained significant traction with the release of his book this summer, “Healthcare, Guaranteed.”

All three main proposals have strong support among members of Congress, but it remains to be seen what the compromise between the administration and Congress will look like.  One thing is for sure: the fight is on.