History was made today. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved comprehensive health care reform legislation, the first Congressional committee to do so in decades. Never mind that the bill is well to the left of the emerging consensus concerning health care reform. Never mind that it passed on a party line 13-10 vote. […]

The idea of connectors, exchanges, gateways and purchasing pools are far more than a fad, they’ve been around far too long. A purchasing pool was central to the Clinton Administration health care reform effort in the 1990s. They have been enacted in several states (although the California version, created in 1993, has since gone out-of-business). […]

For health care reform, the next few weeks will be critical. Congressional committees are poised to pass legislation (to put this in perspective, this never happened during the Clinton Administration’s reform efforts in 1993-94). President Obama and his aides will become even more engaged concerning the legislative language they would like to see Congress enact. […]