Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Understanding the Kennedy health care bill | KeithHennessey.com

Understanding the Kennedy health care bill | KeithHennessey.com

Over the weekend a draft of Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) health care bill leaked. After playing with Adobe Acrobat, here is the text of the draft Kennedy bill as a text file (173 K), and as a single Acrobat file (3.4 MB). Update: I fixed the broken link to the PDF. Unlike the leaked version, both of these are searchable.

Calling it the “Kennedy” bill is something of an overstatement. Senator Kennedy chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, and his staff wrote the draft. By all reports, however, Chairman Kennedy’s health is preventing him from being heavily involved in the drafting. Senator Reid has designated Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to supervise the process, but as best I can tell, it’s really the Kennedy committee staff who are making most of the key decisions. For now I will call it the Kennedy-Dodd bill.

As the committee staff emphasized to the press after the leak, this is an interim draft. I assume things will move around over the next several weeks as discussions among Senators and their staffs continue. This is therefore far from a final product, but it provides a useful insight into current thinking among some key Senate Democrats.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Spamming will be removed.

Due to spamming. Comments need to be moderated. Your post will appear after moderated regardless of your views as long as they are not abusive in nature. Consistent abusive posters will not be viewed but deleted.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.