The Finance Committee Bill
The America's Healthy Future Act is landmark health care reform legislation to lower costs and provide quality, affordable health care coverage. The legislation will make it easier for families and small businesses to buy health care coverage, ensure Americans can choose to keep the health care coverage they have if they like it and slow the growth of health care costs over time. It will bar insurance companies from discriminating against people based on health status, denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, or imposing annual caps or lifetime limits on coverage.
The bill would improve the way the health care system delivers care by improving efficiency, quality, and coordination.
Provisions included in the legislation to ensure Americans have quality, affordable, health care coverage would:
- Create health care affordability tax credits to help low and middle income families purchase insurance in the private market;
- Provide tax credits for small businesses to help them offer insurance to their employees;
- Allow people who like the coverage they have today the choice to keep it;
- Reform the insurance market to end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, gender, and health status;
- Eliminate annual and lifetime limits on the amount of coverage plans provide;
- Create web-based insurance exchanges that would standardize health plan premiums and coverage information to make purchasing insurance easier;
- Give consumers the choice of non-profit, consumer owned and oriented plans (CO-OP);
- Standardize Medicaid coverage for everyone under 133 percent of the federal poverty level.
Provisions included in the legislation to improve the quality of care, increase efficiency within the health care system, and lower health care costs would:
- Shift incentives in Medicare to reward better care, not just more care;
- Increase the number of primary care doctors in the system;
- Aggressively fight fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare;
- Encourage all of a patient's doctors to coordinate care and reduce duplication and waste;
- Create incentives for health care providers to improve quality by using safer, more cost effective health technology like electronic medical records; and
- Increase health care research so doctors know what care works best for which patients.
Provisions included in the legislation to promote preventive health care and wellness would:
- Provide annual "wellness visits" for Medicare participants and their doctors to focus on prevention;
- Eliminate out-of-pocket costs for screening and prevention services in Medicare;
- Create incentives in Medicare and Medicaid for completing healthy lifestyle programs;
- Increase federal Medicaid funding for states that cover recommended preventive services and immunizations for enrollees at no extra cost; and
- Provide free tobacco cessation services for pregnant women in Medicaid.
