Introduction

This is the Health Reform bill passed by the Senate on December 24, 2009.

As noted last week on the Commentary page, provisions concerning nursing homes already discussed in this blog have not been affected by the final amendments to the bill.   There is one change affecting my December 10 post, which describes provisions with an immediate impact on people’s healthcare coverage.  See it here.

Now,  here is the complicated part, at least as far as this blog’s Senate Bill Table of Contents is concerned.  In publishing the final bill, whoever is responsible for handling such things in the Senate has not integrated the changes throughout the previous version of the bill, but instead has tacked on a new Title X, which includes all the amendments for provisions still listed in Titles I through IX, giving the amended provisions new section numbers in the process.

• For example, the amendments to the old Sec. 1001 (amending sections 2711 through 2719 of the Public Health Services Act) are laid out in a new Sec. 10101.
• Even more confusing, the old Sec. 9017 (imposing a 5% excise tax on elective cosmetic surgery) appears unchanged in the final bill.  Take a look, though, at  Sec. 10907 (rough translation: “Never mind!”)

I haven’t quite figured out yet what to do about this in my Table of Contents, although I have added two new PHS Act sections to Sec. 1001, with annotations as to where they come from.  Other than that, my ToC  is currently up to date (such as it is) only through Sec. 9023.  If anyone has any suggestions for how you would like me to handle the new Article X, post a comment and let me know…

If you haven’t already used my Table of Contents, its original purpose was to reformat the ToC that appeared with the November 19 version of the Senate bill in order to make it easier to follow.  I did this primarily because key reform provisions appear in Sections 1011 and 1201 of the bill, but because they are amendments to the existing  Public Health Service Act, the reader suddenly finds himself drowning in what appear to be section numbers  that bear no relationship to the numbering scheme of the whole bill.   (They are in fact  PHS Act section numbers.)  I have listed such PHS Act section numbers with bullet points so as to help distinguish them from  the sections of the bill itself.

The main reason for including the Table of Contents now is to give readers an easy way to see whether any of my blog posts have discussed something that’s in a particular provision.  As I add posts, I add hyperlinks to the relevant discussion in the ToC.

The Title, Subtitle, Part, Subpart and Section names are taken from the bill itself.  (Unlike the House Bill, the Senate version does not use Divisions.) Anything in brackets is my comment, added for clarification.

Finally, just in case you’re curious, the Senate bill has a House number because the original Majority Leader’s version, introduced November 19, was created by taking a House bill on a different subject, gutting it, and inserting the language you find here.