The upshot is we are moving closer to a House vote as early as next week, and Senate votes the week after. The momentum is unmistakable.
One of the ongoing narratives is the opposition to reform of Wellpoint/Anthem Blue Cross. The White House continues to spotlight the company and appropriately rebut its claims. They'v e come a long way since their days as a nonprofit safety-net provider, as public radio's Sarah Varney explains with the help of our colleague Lori Sobel at Consumers Union. Jon Cohn at The New Republic has a similar take. Instead, Anthem Blue Cross has refined a business model based on collecting premiums from the healthy and avoiding the sick, as I wrote on this blog, that has been picked up by the California Progress Report and the new web portal HealthyCal. All of these stories indicate that this is a natural evolution based on our current laws and regulations which allow such practices, and what we need is a reformed system to remove the incentives for insurers' bad behavior.
That's exactly what Congress will be voting on in the next week or two.
with a background as a consumer advocate and community organizer on many issues, including health issues for the last ten years in California and New Jersey.
