First Bill in Congress! (First to Legislative Purgatory.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first coverage-for-all health care reform submitted to the House of Representatives for the 111th Congress today.  One bold legislator has stepped up for his plan to achieve coverage for every American.

All of you who had money on Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), please collect your winnings.  The rest of you, don’t feel too bad.  You’re not likely to see the Stark Plan come up again.

HR 183 HR 193, the AmeriCare Act, would provide a mechanism for coverage for all, although it doesn’t address questions of either cost or quality (and so doesn’t fit my definition of universal health care.)  Essentially the plan would allow every American to either buy into Medicare or keep the coverage that they already had.  If you chose Medicare, you'd pay capped premiums directly to them (the cap is pretty low, so it's not clear from the bill how the government would make up the extra costs).  It’s not a bad idea – somewhere between Medicare for All and the Obama/Clinton/Edwards plan.  But it begins the long parade of health care bills that are likely to go nowhere.

How do I know?  Stark has introduced it twice before – as HR 5886 in 2006 and HR 1841 in 2007.  In 2006, the House was still in Republican hands.  Stark found 36 co-sponsors for his bill, but it was quickly bounced to three committees and was last seen being sent for review to the Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations, where it was never heard from again.

But in 2007, the House had turned Democratic.  In this far more favorable environment, Stark found 32 co-sponsors, but it was just as quickly bounced to three committees and three different subcommittees, last coming to rest in the Subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions where, once again, it was never heard from again.

This is a good a reminder to manage our expectations.  Congress is a weird place, as Schoolhouse Rock told us long ago.  A lot of bills will get introduced, a lot of them early on, all of them with any number of co-sponsors, but most of them will ultimately be citations on the Library of Congress’ Web site and not law.  We’ll hear from Stark again – he’s chair of the Subcommittee on Health, and a great advocate against the excesses of the private insurance companies, Medicare Advantage, and the drug companies – but we’re still waiting to learn what health care reform looks like this year in Congress.

(Photo credit:  _andrew_ on Flickr.)