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This bill has been estimated to extend health insurance to roughly 96 percent of the population at a ten year cost of $894 billion. It contains a number of tax and revenue provisions that result in it being deficit neutral over the 10-year budget period.

Expanding Coverage and Choice

• Established a new Health Insurance Exchange for individuals and employers to use for comparison shopping between health care plans. The Exchange will carry plans that meet certain minimum coverage standards and will be available to the general public as a website and telephone hotline.

• Creates a government-run public health insurance option to compete with the private plans offered on the Exchange. Unlike a previous version of the bill that would tie the public option to Medicare rates, the public option would have reimbursment rates that are negotiated by the Secretary of HHS. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the negotiated-rate public option would have higher premiums, on average, than similar private plans.

• The bill contains a number of consumer protections including a ban on insurance companies denying coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions. It would also prohibit annual and lifetime caps on benefits and would only allow insurance companies to consider age, geographic region and family size when setting rates.

• long-standing exemption from the federal antitrust laws would be ended by the bill.

Making Insurance More Affordable

• Provides sliding-scale affordability credits for helping low and medium-income people buy insurance. The credits start and are most generous just above 150% of the Federal Poverty Level (the proposed new cut off for Medicaid) and are phased out completely at 400% of FPL. No affordability credits would be given to undocumented immigrants and any that are used to buy insurance plans that cover abortion must be segregated from the individual's share of the premiums so that the credits don't go towards the abortion coverage.

• Caps annual out-of-pocket spending for qualifying plans at a maximum of $5,000 per individual.

• Expands Medicaid eligibility to all individuals and families with incomes below 150% of the FPL.

Mandates

• Requires all employers (besides small ones with payrolls below $500,000 annually) to provide insurance for their eployees or pay a fine based on a percentage of their pay roll. The percentage would be phased up from 2% for companies just above the $500,000 payroll floor to the full 8 percent for companies with payrolls above $750,000.

• Starting in 2013, once all provisions are implemented, it would require all individuals to have qualifying insurance coverage or pay an annual fine capped at 2.5 percent of income.