Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Senate Finance Committee, Pt.1 -- For Health Care Reform

All the news these days seems to be about health insurance costs. Here is some relief , perhaps, for the one-sided shadow cast on the health insurance industry. The US Senate Finance Committee met yesterday and heralded a new progressive theme "Seizing the New Opportunity for Health Reform". The purpose was to establish general principles and goals for the critical reform of our badly broken healthcare system. It was reaffirmed that quality healthcare should be available to all – the 47 million without health insurance must not be ignored. Only a comprehensive reform could achieve this, not incremental. With the skyrocketing medical care costs (not more care, just more expensive) the supporting health insurance industry is left to reconcile the extremely expensive medical costs to an extremely economically depressed population. Tough place to be. Starting with this meeting, there are intended to be many more, as consensus develops. As such, this meeting sought to define the task and illuminate the best starting point. Two experts Donna Shalala and Tommy Thompson (both former Heath and Human Service Secretaries) were called in to testify of our current state of affairs and their best recommendations to a resolve.

Preceding US Senator Salazar is spearheading this effort and intends to see it through. Disturbed about constituents in his home state of Colorado with over 780,000 people without health insurance -- 180,000 being children - Senator Salazar had much to say about the immediacy and resolve in helping all those who can’t afford health insurance. The following four parts of this series contain the Senator’s statements from the Finance Committee hearing:

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