A cost estimate for the health care bill under debate in the Senate comes to just shy of $8,000 per U.S. family. It’s an incomplete cost estimate according to the Congressional Budget Office, which produced it.

Like the House did the other week, the Senate is having a special Saturday session devoted to health care. It’s a great chance to see your representatives at work.

Take a look at them, streamed on C-SPAN.

The base bill is H.R. 3590. It was introduced in the House as the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009. That bill amended the Internal Revenue Code to help military service members and a few other government employers purchase homes. Over in the Senate, their substituting in a health care bill. Go figure.

You wouldn’t be too far wrong if you suspected that Congress sometimes goes out of its way to confuse us. Speaking of confusing, you can read the whole thing here.

As the bill to help military service members, H.R. 3590 got a pretty good vote. We’ll see how it fares as a health care bill. The House bill is H.R. 3962.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 3590, now known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

A new cost estimate for the health care bill that the House passed Saturday puts it at about $15,000 per U.S. family. That’s a lot of scratch! An earlier estimate came in at only half that much.

But it’s important not to over-read the estimate. Instead, familiarize yourself with our methodology for scoring bills. We count taxes and revenues as costs to taxpayers, and we treat spending as costs because they move money from the treasury that we all own.

In this bill, the government health insurance “public option” is a big part of what drives the numbers. This is because it has both a revenue component and a spending component.

Some would argue that our methodology double counts the public option. And it is important to understand that it’s pretty much deficit neutral, meaning that it doesn’t increase the national debt because it takes in the amount of money that it spends. We are always looking for ways to present cost information in the most sensible, complete, and scalable way.

We won’t take on the question here of whether the “public option” would ultimately swallow the entire health insurance market. The dollar figure we’re reporting is simply based on the Congressional Budget Office estimate. If you want to read that estimate yourself, of course, you can go to the page for H.R. 3962, scroll down to the “Learn More” box and click on “Read an Analysis of the Bill.”

In the meantime, here’s the current vote on H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

The House of Representatives is having a special Saturday debate on its version of health care legislation, H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

It’s on C-SPAN right now and—guess what!—Republicans and Democrats aren’t getting along. In fact, they’re all kind of behaving like children.

The New York Times has a good post on its “Prescriptions” blog describing the procedures that the House will be following during its debate today. Watching this debate is a civics lesson like you never got in school.

It looks like the debate will continue all day, so pull up a couch, pop some popcorn, and feel free to comment on the page for the bill.

Health care reform legislation will be debated in the House this coming week, and the issue is all teed up.

H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, was introduced last week—all 1,990 pages of it.

You can see it by clicking “Read the bill” in the “Learn more” box on the bill’s page.

The Los Angeles Times has a good story answering questions about what the bill is meant to do.

The bill also has a score from the Congressional Budget Office. What it boils down to is this: a cost of over $7,800 per U.S. family. (Read about our methodology here.)

Here’s some summary language from CBO:

The estimate includes a projected net cost of $894 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $1,055 billion in subsidies provided through the exchanges (and related spending), increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $167 billion in collections of penalties paid by individuals and employers. On balance, other effects on revenues and outlays associated with the coverage provisions add $6 billion to their total cost.

Over the 2010–2019 period, the net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of other spending changes, which CBO estimates would save $426 billion, and receipts resulting from the income tax surcharge on high-income individuals and other provisions, which JCT and CBO estimate would increase federal revenues by $572 billion over that period.

Read the whole estimate (only 27 pages) by clicking “Read an analysis of the bill” in the “Learn more” box on the bill’s page.

For or against? That’s the important question.

Here’s the current vote on the bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more or edit the wiki article on the bill.

The Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill has finally been introducted. It is S. 1796.

At this writing, the bill text is not available, but reports have it that it is 1,502 pages long. To read it, go to the bill page, and click on “Read the Bill” in the “Learn More” box. (Again, if it’s not there yet, it will be soon.)

So do you think, as its authors do, that the bill will “provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending”?

Leave your comments below or on the page for the bill.

And here’s the current vote on S. 1796. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

Among the 40,000 earmark requests submitted by members of Congress is a $10,000,000 earmark for a medical facility in Ashdod, Israel.

This prompts a commenter to ask, “And what do U.S. taxpayers get in return for this $10,000,000 investment?”

The request is by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D) of New York’s fifth district. A 501(c)(3) group called American Friends of Ashdod Medical Center is located in Brooklyn, New York.

Ashdod is the fifth largest city in Israel, with about 207,000 inhabitants. The thing is . . . most of those people are probably not Americans. They’re likely to be, oh . . . , Israelis? The benefit to American taxpayers from such a payout is at least subject to question.

What do you think? Is spending $10,000,000 on a medical facility in Israel a good idea in your view?

Here’s the current vote on that earmark. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about it.

Site visitor Blaine Whittle writes in to note that his petition on Change.org is “#5 with a bullet this week.” Congratulations, Blaine!

The petition supports H.R. 676, the United States National Health Care Act or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. According to its authors, it would provide comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents and improved health care delivery.

The discussion on our page for this bill is decidedly mixed, as it should be on important issues. As of this writing, the vote is running against the bill, but with a low number of voters so far, that could change quickly.

Experts are encouraged to edit the wiki article about the bill. (Here’s how.)

In the meantime, here’s the current vote on H.R. 676. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

A little over $12,000 per U.S. family. That’s the estimated cost of a piece of health care legislation called H.R. 3200, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. I don’t know if “affordable” should really be in the title . . . .

It’s a preliminary estimate, and the bill is very complex, but this number gives you a sense of the size of the bill – and the issue. Health care costs money.

“Instead of saving the federal government from fiscal catastrophe, the health reform measures being drafted by congressional Democrats would increase rather than reduce public spending on health care . . . .”

That’s the lead sentence in a Washington Post article about testimony in Congress from the Congressional Budget Office today. The CBO is the source of most of the cost estimates we translate into per-family and per-person cost estimates for you.

We don’t generally cover issues until they are turned into legislation, and health care is an issue that has been much discussed, but not reduced to writing. All we’ve said so far is, “Here Comes Health Care.” And the legislation predicted in that post has not really materialized – or at least been introduced.

It’s certainly interesting that it’s news to some people – the idea that health care legislation will cost money…