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Health care bill passes House vote

President Barack Obama claimed a significant political victory on Sunday when the Democratic-controlled Congress voted to approve legislation that would extend health care coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and impose stricter regulations on the insurance industry.

The House of Representatives voted 219-212 to pass the Senate health care bill that was passed in December. With all 178 House Republicans and 34 Democrats opposed to the Senate bill, the majority party was barely able to secure the 216 votes needed to send the legislation to Obama for signature.

All 20 Texas House Republicans voted against the bill, joined by Democrat Chet Edwards (Waco). The remaining 11 Texas Democrats voted in support of the bill.

Obama, who made health care reform the top domestic priority of his presidency when taking office in January 2009, is expected to sign the bill into law Tuesday.

The historic legislation brings a brutal battle between the two major political parties closer to an end after more than a year of debate in Congress.

Later Sunday evening, the House passed a smaller package of changes to the Senate bill with a 220-211 vote. The measure will be sent to the Senate, which is expected to take it up for debate this week.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told House Democrats on Saturday that he had the “commitment of a significant majority” of Senate Democrats to approve the package of fixes.

If the measure is approved, it would also be sent to Obama for signature.

The Associated Press reported that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 32 million previously uninsured Americans would gain coverage under the conditions of the bill passed Sunday. The CBO also said that insurance companies would no longer be able to deny individuals coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions.

The bill will also have a direct effect on college students, as it calls for all student loans to be provided by the government instead of banks and private lenders.

6 Comments

  • Well,the thing that I will probably remember most is Elwyn Lee’s baby mama lying her fat,greasy,fat,blubbery,fat,saggy,fat,servant class behind off when she went to the well of the House and insulted the collective intelligence of the entire American public when she claimed that this health care bill was “not and unfunded mandate”…when it clearly is and anybody who has followed what is in the bill knows that….but this is the same woman who asked NASA scientists if the Mars rover had found the flag that Neil Armstrong had planted yet..so I expect her to stick her foot in it….and to lie

  • It seems that the only thing BI-Partisan about this bill is the opposition to it… it is also comforting to know that all it takes is less than 1% more of the house to pass a bill that the other 49.2% of the house does not want. I believe a system of government where the idea with the most people behind it is not called a democracy but rather Mob Rule.

    Has anyone else noticed that the Patriot Act is still in effect? Has anyone else noticed that no one has mentioned anything about this act since the change in administration?

  • A bicameral majority is hardly mob rule. Although, other landmark social programs had more absolute numbers of minority-party votes, it’s hard to take the GOP seriously when they sit on the sideline and sandbag legislation for 6 months before making any serious attempts at bipartisanship.

    If you want to know more how the Bill increases accessibility to higher education here at UH follow the link below. (The final sentence of this article is rather clumsy and misleading)

    http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/loan-q-a/

  • caps on what insurers can charge

    expanded medicaid coverage

    reimbursement for buying insurance if you are poor

    allows people from purchasing insurance even if they have a preexisting condition

    will insure several million people who could not previously afford it and will end up being cheaper in the long run

    these are all positive developments for the underclass, which was the aim of the bill. this is huge and will lead to america taking one more step towards joining the civilized world.

    btw i hope this leads to everyone realizing that the teabaggers are an irrelevant gaggle of racist grampas wearing goofy tricorner hats.

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