�Թϲ�����

It was a big political discussion in a very small room. “Medicare for all” got its first congressional hearing on Tuesday, albeit in one of the House’s tightest meeting rooms, in an area of the Capitol off limits to the scores of people who assembled in Washington to show support. The idea of a single government health care system for all Americans has been treated with extreme caution by the Democratic leadership, which has stressed more modest improvements to the current health law. On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was pointing to the bills moving through the House Judiciary Committee that could lower the prices of prescription drugs. (Sanger-Katz, 4/30)

In the opening moments of Congress’s first-ever hearing on Medicare-for-all, House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) hit on a theme that already has begun to dominate the 2020 Democratic primary season: “Health care is a right for all,” he said, “not a privilege for the lucky few.” That mantra, which he and others invoked on Tuesday, is political ammunition for liberals’ crusade to convert the U.S. health-care system into a single-payer model. The language casts a redesign, intended to guarantee all Americans access to care by enlarging the government’s role, as a moral imperative. (Goldstein, 4/30)

Democrats who've spent much of this year mired by infighting closed ranks to amplify the party’s broader ambitions on a critical political issue ahead of the 2020 elections — and blunt GOP attacks over Medicare for All’s cost and government expansion. “We’re spending an awful lot on health care right now, and we’re not getting the services and the effectiveness that we’re all demanding,” Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern said at the outset of the hearing, which was briefly attended by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “I’d like to think we all believe we can do better.” (Cancryn and Ollstein, 4/30)

GOP panel members repeatedly pressed McGovern on why the Rules Committee, which is often controlled by the Speaker, was the one holding a Medicare for All hearing.
 McGovern, who took over as head of the panel in January, responded by saying: “There’s a new sheriff in town. That’s why we’re doing the hearing.” The location underscored the divisions the Democratic Party faces in how it plans to improve a system where 29 million Americans are uninsured, and millions more can’t afford their premiums, deductibles and prescription drugs. (Hellmann, 4/30)

Kaiser Health News: A Big Hearing For ‘Medicare-For-All’ — In A Small Room

For all the political machinations and sometimes overheated rhetoric about a major overhaul of the U.S. health system, the hearing itself was remarkably unremarkable — with witnesses both for and against the idea of the federal government providing health coverage to all Americans calmly discussing the pros and cons. (Rovner, 4/30)

Overall, the hearing featured a thorough back-and-forth on the tradeoffs that would come with implementing a single-payer health care system. While people would pay more in taxes, they would not pay for health care costs like premiums, deductibles and copays that people currently face. Those types of tradeoffs are part of the key questions that lawmakers would have to answer if they plan in earnest to transition to a single-payer system. Lawmakers also discussed the at least $32 trillion, 10-year price tag associated with a single-payer system that would shift current health care spending to the government, rather than coverage through private insurance or other programs. (McIntire, 4/30)

And in one exchange, Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), a freshman in Congress but former HHS secretary under President Bill Clinton who hasn't thrown her support behind Medicare for All, stated that private insurers "have been less effective" than the government at controlling costs. This spurred Collins to criticize the leverage that hospitals in concentrated markets in particularly have to negotiate high reimbursement rates. On the other side, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the conservative Galen Institute and outspoken opponent to a single-payer system, argued that universal adoption of Medicare rates would shutter hospitals. (Luthi, 4/30)

A sweeping Medicare for All proposal was given its first public hearing Tuesday, but isn’t likely to become law anytime soon. Still, the hearing before the House Rules Committee allowed progressive House Democrats to promote a controversial proposal that has split their party – as well as Connecticut’s all-Democratic congressional delegation. (Radelat, 4/30)

Seema Verma, a top White House health administrator, on Tuesday criticized the Medicare for All health proposal, saying it poses a threat to patient choice and would limit competition. “We have got to support a free market where patients are making decisions, not the government,”  said Ms. Verma, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and has led many of the White House’s initiatives on giving patients more cost data. (Armour and Burton, 4/30)