WASHINGTON — Senior House Democrats on Friday presented a sweeping plan to reshape the nation’s health care system — including a promise to provide health insurance to nearly 50 million uninsured Americans without adding to the nation’s debt.
The 852-page “discussion draft” was unveiled as Democrats on Capitol Hill worked to keep up momentum behind their ambitious plan to pass a major health care bill before year’s end. It called for a new government insurance option program, a mandate on employers to provide coverage and a guarantee of subsidized health care for the poor.
However, the draft offered few indications of how such an expansion of government support for health care would be paid for.
The bill’s authors said they would detail their plan to cover the costs in coming weeks. The full price tag is expected to top $1 trillion over 10 years.
The blueprint drew praise from President Barack Obama: “This proposal would improve the affordability, availability and quality of health care and represents a major step toward . . . our goal of fixing what is broken about health care while building on what works.”
But the insurance industry attacked the proposal to offer a government medical plan that consumers could choose as an alternative to private coverage.
Senior House Democrats on Friday signaled unwillingness to let up their drive to use government power to wrest control of the insurance market from an industry many blame for denying people coverage while driving up costs and pocketing exorbitant profits.
