S. 1252 would “promote ocean and human health.”

Let’s say you’ve been injured by a doctor. Who do you want deciding what happens? Do you want to be able to go to court, or do you want your claim considered by a “health care tribunal”?

The people in the picture to the right are not a health care tribunal. They’re a random group that probably look like what a health care tribunal would look like. Who are they? How did they get there? Do they have any relationships with health care providers? Or plaintiffs’ lawyers? Or defense lawyers?

They look very nice, and they certainly mean well. They’ve probably studied the papers in front of them very carefully. They have a computer, which is good. And they’ve got a couple bottles of water or soda to drink from – but not too much. None of this means they should replace judges and juries.

H.R. 2787 would send federal money to states to help them set up “health care tribunals.” (It doesn’t say how much.)

Congress is looking at dozens of ways of tweaking the health care system. We should be very careful about walking away from the our legal tradition, which gives injured people the right to sue for damages. There are certainly excessive claims in health care litigation, and there might be some tweaks to that system in order. But I sure don’t want the nice people on a “tribunal” deciding what is supposed to be decided by a judge or jury after a fair and impartial trial. Open to convincing, in the comments . . .

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 2787. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

As early as Monday, Senator Kennedy (D-MA) may unveil health care legislation, and President Obama says that he wants this issue to be dealt with this year. All this is according to a Washington Post story.

According to the Post:

In many respects it adopts the most liberal approaches to health reform being discussed in Washington. Kennedy, for example, embraces a proposal to create a government-sponsored insurance program to compete directly with existing private insurance plans, according to one senior adviser who was not authorized to talk to reporters.

The draft summary also calls for opening Medicaid to those whose incomes are 500 percent of the federal poverty level, or $110,250 a year for a family of four.

President Obama, meanwhile, is urging his most loyal supporters to reactivate the grass-roots machine that helped elect him and direct it toward health-care reform.

Kennedy also wrote about his bill recently in the Boston Globe.

We’ll feature the bill here, of course, when it is introduced. And as the cost-estimates come in, we’ll note them too.

With the illness formerly known as “swine flu” splashed across the headlines all through the last week, it’s no surprise to see Congress surfing the issue.

S. 953, introduced on Friday, would establish “programs and activities to increase influenza vaccination rates through the provision of free vaccines.”

It’s hard to know whether free vaccines meet the problem of new strains of influenza, but what the heck. Congress is coming to the rescue!

Here’s the current vote on S. 953. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

If H.R. 1142 passes, it will.

The bill would require States to provide “hair prostheses” under the Medicaid Program for people diagnosed with alopecia areata, sometimes called “spot baldness.” It affects 0.1%–0.2% of humans, both males and females, and in 1%–2% of cases, it can spread to the entire scalp or the entire body.

I’m pretty sure “hair prostheses” means toupées and wigs.

That’s right: Medicaid might pay for toupées.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 1142. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

Cost estimates for bills on the floor this week have been published and incorporated into our database.

H.R. 384, the TARP Reform and Accountability Act of 2009, saves the average U.S. family a little over $80. (Which is nice until you realize that the legislation creating the Troubled Assets Relief Program cost almost $3,000.)

It was debated some on Wednesday (1/14) and will get a vote very soon.

H.R. 2, the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, costs just shy of $2,000 per U.S. family.

It passed the House Wednesday. Take a look at the roll call vote on passage if you want to see how your representative voted.

The National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research is having a meeting on Friday this coming week. But the meeting is closed to the public.

The grant applications and the discussions could disclose confidential trade secrets or commercial property such as patentable material, and personal information concerning individuals associated with the grant applications, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

Grant applicants are using government funds to work on advancing their business interests, so we don’t get to know about it? And on top of that, we don’t get to know who they are?

This looks like a bunch of bunk. The meeting notice is even being published less than the 15 days prior to the meeting as required “due to the timing limitations imposed by the review and funding cycle.” Uh-huh.

But nobody pays much attention to the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research, and so they get to do stuff like this. In the dark corners of the government stuff like this goes on all the time. It’s your money. You’re paying for it.

Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is the term given to a number of different disorders with a common genetic cause. They manifest themselves in weakness due to loss of the motor neurons of the spinal cord and brain stem.

Infantile SMA is the most severe form, and it’s symptoms include muscle weakness, poor muscle tone, weak cry, limpness or a tendency to flop, difficulty sucking or swallowing, and other problems. (Got all this info from Wikipedia.)

But enough of the clinical stuff: It’s just devastating to parents.

And they’re expressing their feelings on two bills here: H.R. 3334 is the SMA Treatment Acceleration Act, and S. 2042 is its Senate counterpart. The bills would require the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services to take various steps to coordinate programs and research trials aimed at finding treatments and cures.

They’re also telling their stories on Web sites dedicated to the young victims. Gwendolyn Strong has a Web site. And there’s also one dedicated to the memory of little Owen Shuler, who passed away in August. These children are loved.

Will these bills hasten a cure for SMA? One can’t predict easily how or how much they would help. It’s also hard to know whether this disease deserves more focus than others. But the families need outlets for their anguish, and we can all feel for them and wish them well.

The Senate passed bailout legislation this evening by a vote of 74 to 25. Senators McCain and Obama both voted for it, as did Senator Biden. National Journal has a good story on the wheeling, dealing, and lobbying that pushed the Senate in favor.

It’s unclear whether the goodies added to the bill “sweeten” it in a way that will get it through the House, or if the backscratching represented by the bill coming out of the Senate will give more offense to the public and House members who opposed the bailout.

Without specific information about what is in the package passed in the Senate, it is impossible to estimate the cost of the overall bill. But it is large.

Below is the vote in the Senate. If you don’t know which Senators are yours, find the name of a U.S. state on the front of an envelope that has been delivered to your house, then find that state below . . . .

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Silly season on Capitol Hill. It’s that special time of year when Congress nears the end of its scheduled session and decides to do all its work at once. Dozens of bills fly across the House floor with little debate.

They’re not all bad bills, but nothing prevented Congress from addressing them at a careful pace all through the winter, spring, and summer.

This year has been particularly silly, as Congress didn’t even try to follow its annual budgeting and spending process. It just passed a temporary measure on the fly, funding the government through the first half of the fiscal year in one big bill.

Then along came the financial services crisis. (Or is it a “crisis”? I’m less and less sure that it’s a crisis for anyone more than the investment bankers who overextended themselves.)

Smack dab at the end of the session, right when members want to go home and campaign, they have to think about a $700 bailout of the financial services industry. (Text of the proposal that failed Monday is here.)

Congress comes back Thursday – maybe to consider another bailout proposal. Don’t lose focus on that issue just yet!

But for the moment, let’s take a look at some of what the Congress did while we focused on everything else that Congress was doing. These are the bills that went to the floor of the House of Representatives on Saturday. The bills that were on the House floor last Thursday and Friday are here and here. Monday’s bills coming soon:
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