Whew! It seems impossible to keep up with all the recent activity related to health reform these days – and it seems like the next two weeks are going to be even more action-packed. To help me (and all of you) stay on top of all the goings on here in DC, we’ve put together a calendar of what we are expecting over the coming weeks. First you’ll see that next week, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) will be marking up the bill it released earlier this week (Affordable Health Choices Act). That will be followed by the release of the Senate Committee on Finance mark, which we expect to be acted upon by the committee the following week. Finally, we expect hearings to begin sometime in the next few weeks on a bill being developed by a “Tri-Committee” effort of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the House Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Ways and Means.
CCF will be doing in-depth summaries of each of these bills with a focus on the implications for children and families. The bills are quite dense and the summaries may take some time to be completed. However in the meantime, you can expect some quick and dirty blogs from CCF’s Executive Directors Jocelyn Guyer and Joan Alker to give you a flavor of what our initial thoughts are, beginning with one coming early next week on the Senate HELP Committee’s bill from Jocelyn.
We also wanted to be sure you saw the resolution introduced this past week by Senator Casey (D-PA) to help raise the profile of children’s coverage in health reform. We hope to see more of these types of activities to make sure children’s coverage is an integral part of this debate in the coming weeks. If we do, we will be blogging about them here.
