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Dec 11, 2009
The Asso­ci­ated Press: “A loop­hole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on med­ical care for people strug­gling with costly ill­nesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advo­cates.” An ear­lier ver­sion of the bill in a Senate com­mittee forbid the prac­tice, but a tweak would allow limits so long as they aren’t “unrea­son­able” (Alonso-Zaldivar, 12/11). 

The Wash­ington Post: The paper’s Fed­eral Diary colum­nist exam­ines how the pro­posal to allow the gov­ern­ment to allow unin­sured people to buy sim­ilar pack­ages as fed­eral employees receive could affect the Office of Per­sonnel Man­age­ment. “[W]ould those new duties change the char­acter of the agency and affect its pri­mary mis­sion of serving fed­eral employees? Those are not the kinds of ques­tions easily dealt with in leg­is­la­tion” (Davidson, 12/11).

NPR: Unions are con­tin­uing to protest the pro­posed tax on “Cadillac” health plans in the Senate bill. “There’s five other ways in the Senate and House bills to pay for health care in a fair way. There’s one way that’s unfair, and that’s this excise tax that will break the backs of the health care for 30 mil­lion Amer­i­cans over the next five years,” said Larry Cohen, pres­i­dent of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Workers of America (Rovner, 12/11).

Asso­ci­ated Press: “Drug com­pa­nies would no longer be able to mine phar­macy records to track which doc­tors are pre­scribing their med­ica­tions, under a pro­posal unveiled Thursday by two Senate Democ­rats. The amend­ment to the Senate health care bill would effec­tively ban phar­ma­ceu­tical data mining, the drug com­pany prac­tice of buying pre­scrip­tion records to target sales pitches to doc­tors” (Per­rone, 12/10).

This is part of Kaiser Health News’ Daily Report — a sum­mary of health policy cov­erage from more than 300 news orga­ni­za­tions. The full sum­mary of the day’s news can be found here and you can sign up for e-mail sub­scrip­tions to the Daily Report here. In addi­tion, our staff of reporters and cor­re­spon­dents file orig­inal sto­ries each day, which you can find on our home page.