{"id":364291,"date":"2010-02-25T18:14:09","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T23:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/02\/25\/health-summit-they-came-they-talked-they-left-much-undone\/"},"modified":"2010-02-25T18:14:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T23:14:09","slug":"health-summit-they-came-they-talked-they-left-much-undone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/364291","title":{"rendered":"Health Summit: They Came, They Talked, They Left Much Undone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"summit\"Well, there was no breakthrough of understanding between Democrats and Republicans over health care at today’s summit, but there were areas of agreement on some issues. Of course even where there were shared goals, there was division<\/a> over how to achieve them. <\/p>\n

But the aim of the summit was to find shared ground, so here are some small patches of agreement during the session:<\/p>\n

Medicare malpractice:<\/strong> Republicans have push hard for curbs on malpractice suits to cut costs, something the Democrats have been slow to endorse. President Obama said today he wanted to work with the GOP on changes, although he disputed the size of the prospective cost benefits. Possible limits on malpractice damages remain a major sore point. <\/p>\n

Purchasing pools<\/strong>: Democrats back purchasing exchanges for individuals and small businesses to pool their purchasing power and get better coverage for the buck from plans meeting federal standards. Republican Sen. Mike Enzi told the summit that he goes along with purchasing exchanges, but they should include all the plans insurers want to offer.<\/p>\n

Pre-existing coverage denials<\/strong>: There’s general agreement that insurers shouldn’t be allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing health conditions. But Republicans favor setting up pools for high-risk coverage while Democrats want to mandate that most people buy insurance, which would spread the risk.<\/p>\n

Dems and Republicans all pledged to try to build on the areas of agreement, such as they are. But it wasn’t clear if the efforts would get any further than the bipartisan bickering before the summit. There’s more on the consensus areas broached at the summit here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Photo: AFP\/Getty Images<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, there was no breakthrough of understanding between Democrats and Republicans over health care at today’s summit, but there were areas of agreement on some issues. Of course even where there were shared goals, there was division over how to achieve them. But the aim of the summit was to find shared ground, so here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}