Health Care Reform Update

The big news yesterday was the daylong summit between President Obama and several members of both major parties from the House and Senate, including party leadership from both houses. While it's best to leave discussion of the summit's political and legislative consequences to strategists and pundits, it is worth taking a quick look at some of the more recent analyses of this important issue.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has created a good introductory report providing an overview of some of the salient health care reform issues here (PDF); it is six months old but still very relevant. CRS doesn't make their reports public, but many organizations collect these reports and make them available. Students can use Open CRS as a gateway to search for more reports from the CRS on health care reform.

After reading through the above report, another indispensable resource is the Kaiser Family Foundation's page on reform proposals. It allows the user to make easy side-by-side comparisons of two or more proposals, including the House bill, the Senate bill, the White House proposal, and many of the previous proposals.

Lastly, students looking for more in-depth analysis and information can browse the Congressional Budget Office's regularly updated catalog of health care reform-related reports.