Politics

Still Haven't Read the White House Health Care Proposal?

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

I know it’s sometimes off-putting to have to interrupt your web browsing to download a PDF, open it up using a separate program and then have it clutter up your desktop. That’s why we’ve taken the full text of the plan that the White House released yesterday, converted it into HTML and posted it as a webpage. No more excuses!

Read the White House Health Care Proposal>>

It’s an easy and rewarding read, actually a great way to catch up on the major issues that remain with Congress’ health care bill. Unlike the actual House and Senate health care bills, which are written in legalese and designed to be read by lawyers, the White House proposal is written in plain, easy to understand English. And it’s relatively brief.

This document is probably going to form the basis for the final health care bill that the Democrats have pledged to pass into law within the next two months. That is, unless there is some kind of bipartisan breakthrough at the health care summit the White House is holding on Thursday, which seems incredibly unlikely.

The White House plan cleans up some of the unpopular provisions from the bills passed by Congress — like the Medicaid deal for Nebraska and further closes the Medicare Part D “donut hole.” It also strike a balance on dozens of other issues between the more conservative Senate bill and the more progressive House bill.

Bloggers, we encourage you to help build public knowledge abut what’s in this crucial health care document by sharing the link or using it as citation material in your posts. Readers that might be disinclined to click download a .pdf just might click through to learn more about the plan online.

Full post as published by Open Congress on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).