![\"health](\"http:\/\/d.yimg.com\/a\/p\/afp\/20091109\/capt.photo_1257675638854-9-0.jpg?x=400&y=320&q=85&sig=xmKCeznkQ6KUlBXvoB8I7g--\")
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a healthcare reform bill late last Saturday that had the support of 1 Republican and the opposition of 39 Democrats. Passing with only a 5-vote margin, the bill mandates all Americans have some form of health insurance and that large companies would be forced to offer it to their employees. Those not able to get insurance through their jobs would be eligible for government subsidies. The bill also allows for the creation of an insurance marketplace where the government would sell its own insurance – the so-called public option. Most promisingly, the bill would prevent insurance companies from denying people health care because of earlier illnesses. However, the biggest failure of the Saturday night vote was a capitulation by Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York who had obtained a promise by House Speaker Pelosi to bring a vote to the floor on a proposal for a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system, similar to what most of the industrialized world enjoys. Weiner justified his backing down on the vote with the statement that he “never wanted it to be the situation where we literally let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The next step for healthcare reform is a vote on the Senate version of the bill, which Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, promised in a Fox News interview, would never pass. One major difference with the Senate bill is that the House bill calls on taxes for the wealthy to finance its bigger price tag. <\/p>\n
GUEST: Trudy Lieberman, directs the health and medical reporting program in the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York and is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" | the entire program The House of Representatives narrowly passed a healthcare reform bill late last Saturday that had the support of 1 Republican and the opposition of 39 Democrats. Passing with only a 5-vote margin, the bill mandates all Americans have some form of health insurance and that large companies would be forced to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}