The com­pro­mise health bill that the U.S. Sen­ate Finance Com­mit­tee worked on is to be unveiled today. Some com­pro­mises have been achieved on the health insur­ance bill, and that seems to give the bill only more oppo­nents. More Democ­rats are cit­ing con­cerns that the bill will be too costly to mid­dle income Americans.

For some of the nuts and bolts within the bill, we turn to this arti­cle from the Wall Street Jour­nal. Writ­ers Greg Hitt and Janet Adamy give us the details.

The Bau­cus bill would pro­vide fed­eral sub­si­dies to indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies with incomes as high as 300% of the fed­eral poverty line. For peo­ple whose incomes fall between 300% and 400% of the poverty line, the bill would cap pre­mi­ums at 13% of income.

Crit­ics com­plain the 13% cap is too high and would impose unrea­son­able costs on middle-income fam­ily bud­gets. But Finance Com­mit­tee aides argue that tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans would still ben­e­fit from the cap.

Repub­li­cans, mean­while, have been seek­ing other changes to the bill. In pri­vate nego­ti­a­tions led by Mr. Bau­cus, Sen. Charles Grass­ley (R., Iowa) made a push this week to drop the pro­posed man­date requir­ing indi­vid­u­als to buy insur­ance. Instead, he has pro­posed cre­at­ing a new “rein­sur­ance pool” to help spread the risks asso­ci­ated with high-cost patients.

In a state­ment released late Tues­day, Mr. Grass­ley com­plained the Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­tic lead­er­ship is impos­ing an “arti­fi­cial dead­line” on the bipar­ti­san talks led by Mr. Bau­cus, but vowed to “con­tinue to work with” the chairman.

Health Care for Amer­ica Now, a lib­eral advo­cacy group, esti­mates that a fam­ily of four earn­ing $77,175 a year could pay as much as $10,033 a year for health insur­ance under Sen. Baucus’s pro­posal. That is about $2,000 a year more than they would pay under a health bill passed through the Senate’s Health, Edu­ca­tion, Labor and Pen­sions Com­mit­tee, as well as under two of the three bills passed through House committees.

Mr. Baucus’s bill would also place higher caps than other ver­sions on the amount con­sumers would pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses. It would allow insur­ance com­pa­nies to charge older cus­tomers pre­mi­ums that are as much as five times as high as those for younger cus­tomers, a pro­vi­sion sought by insur­ance com­pa­nies. The other bills would restrict them from charg­ing older cus­tomers more than twice as much.

Like

Unlike