The latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll is in, and the health care reform approval numbers are holding pretty steady. Slightly more people than last month, 54 percent, believe the country will be better off if health reform passes. And 42 percent -- an improvement from earlier this year -- believe that health reform will personally benefit them or their families.

The number who believe health reform will hurt them (24 percent) or the country (27 percent) is down slightly from last month. Roughly the same one-in-four don't think health reform will affect them. Democrats and Independents are more likely than Republicans to view health reform as positive. However, when asked about specific provisions in the health care bills, a majority ranked as  "extremely" or "very" important these components of reform:  affordable, available health insurance, coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, providing subsidies to help the uninsured purchase coverage, requiring all Americans to have health insurance, filling the Medicare donut hole, and not adding to the U.S. budget deficit.

Not many health writers -- not many writers of any ilk, for that matter -- can match T.R. Reid's ability to bring a light, witty touch to really serious topics. Like health policy around the globe.

Tom (that's what the "T" in "T.R." stands for) was the featured speaker at the Peterson Institute of International Economics today. Not the usual venue for the book tour for his best-seller, "Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care." Before his talk, he told me he was planning to stress the moral case for covering everyone. Not the approach, perhaps, that this particular crowd was used to hearing. Go ahead, I told him. It is, after all, a roomful of economists eating a free lunch.

And that's what he did.

Slate's Timothy Noah provides a thoughtful overview of the intellectual origins and political evolution of the public option's place in health reform.

It's a complicated case, the public option. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. But Timothy Noah is the Big Lebowski of health writers, and is the man for the job to keep all these strands together. (Yes, we know we've made that joke before, but like our living room rug it really ties the blog together.)

Noah's goal was to understand why the CBO and others estimated that premiums for a so-called level playing field public option would cost more than private plans. Noah spoke with New America's Len Nichols, whose paper with John Bertko helped outline how a public option with negotiated payment rates could compete on a level playing field with private plans.

After weeks of anticipation and speculation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has unveiled the legislation that will bring health reform to the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

While waiting for the details of the bill to come out Wednesday, we created a little office pool, called the Price is Right for Health Reform. In an office-wide email, we asked our peers to guess the CBO's estimates of the gross costs of the bill. Showcase Showdown rules (closest without going over) applied. We were intentionally vague in our question because estimating the true costs of the bill is inherently a difficult process.

The number we were looking for was $848 billion. The CBO's estimate of the gross cost of the bill is essentially the total cost of coverage provisions over the next 10-years. This is the number most frequently reported in the media as the "cost" of the various health reform bills being discussed. But is this really the best indicator of the true costs of health reform? Maybe not. First, timing matters: $848 billion over ten years is a lot different than a $787 stimulus bill where 90 percent of the money is spent within the first 3 years. So do deficits. How much does a bill cost if it's fully paid for and in fact reduces the deficit as is the case for both the House ($109 billion) and Senate ($130 billion) bills?

We received plenty of calls from our co-workers asking just these questions. We tried to stay quiet, because we were interested in what the educated, non-health policy wonks think about the cost of reform. True to our think tank's "post-partisan roots" we got a range of answers from "too little" to "$600 trillion, Obama lies." We got a couple of "$1" which we assume was a reference to the bill's deficit neutrality, and $90 billion which seems like a reasonable estimate of yearly costs.  But the majority of the answers clustered within the $800-$900 billion range, surprisingly close to the final answer. Few people seemed willing to go above $900 billion, suggesting the power of the official price tag President Obama put on reform during his September address to a Joint Session of Congress. So who won? The answer after this non-commercial break:

The latest version of Senate health care legislation (pdf available here) crafted by Majority Leader Harry Reid is making its rounds.  There is a lot to review, but an initial read shows the bill is close to the legislation approved by the Senate Finance Committee in early October with a few notable changes: more generous subsidies, a higher threshold for the excise tax on insurers who offer high-cost plans, an increase in the Medicare payroll tax for Americans making over $250,000, and the addition of a long-term care insurance program for people with disabilities.

While this legislation also delays the implementation of insurance market reforms and subsidies (when compared to the Senate Finance legislation) there are a number of provisions that would start helping Americans immediately. In particular, the legislation:  

Here is more evidence that the uninsured fare worse than the insured. Including trauma patients in the emergency room. 

The AP's Carla Johnson reported on a troubling study published in Archives of Surgery, Downwardly Mobile: The Accidental Cost of Being Uninsured.  She writes that "uninsured [adult] patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance."

Under a 1986 law known as EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Law), anyone who shows up in an emergency room needing emergency treatment will receive treatment to stabilize him or her. That statute is intended to "prevent hospitals from rejecting patients, refusing to treat them, or transferring them to ‘charity hospitals' or ‘county hospitals' because they are unable to pay or are covered under Medicare or Medicaid."

The House's historic vote on Saturday feels almost like ancient history. By Monday, all eyes turned back to the Senate and the progress of the merged legislation being shepherded by Majority Leader Harry Reid.

H.R. 3962 passed by a margin of 220-215 with 39 Democrats voting against the bill and one Republican representative crossing party lines. (The New York Times has a great graphic illustrating the politics of this vote.) Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Sunday, President Obama thanked lawmakers for their "courageous vote," and called on the Senate "to take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line on behalf of the American people."

The relay is being held up, however, as Reid waits for the CBO to return scores of the various proposals and options he submitted. Estimates are expected to be released by the end of this week, and merged legislation could be released soon after. Still the Senate is not expected to begin debating the legislation until after Thanksgiving, giving Congress essentially four weeks to try and meet President Obama's goal of signing health reform legislation into law before year's end.

It will be a sprint to say the least. You know our stance on the issue, and the White House, too, is stepping up its pressure to not let this slip into 2010.

At the very minimum, it currently seems Reid will try to pass legislation through the Senate before Christmas.That leaves open the option for conferees to work on merging the House and Senate Bills over the holiday recess and clear the way for a vote on final passage early in January.

In addition to the simple logistics of moving historic legislation through the historically slow moving Senate, Kaiser Health News, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal all give a good lay of the land, and here's our quick overview of some of the biggest issues going forward:

Can health reform heal our federal budget? Yes, but whatever passes now is just the beginning, and there will always be room for improvement.

That's our takeaway from an excellent event we tweeted this morning hosted by the US Budget Watch, a joint project between the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

There was a lot of ground covered by a panel of experts moderated by the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly and featuring New America's director of health policy Len Nichols. They tackled everything from raising Medicaid eligibility rates to fixing the Sustainable Growth Rate formula in a fiscally responsible way. But for now, we'll just give you the highlights of the discussion.

Ceci Connolly at the Washington Post asks the $64,000 question -- or maybe it's more of a $6.4 trillion question. Do the House and Senate health care bills go far enough in reshaping how we deliver health care so that we can control rising costs?

A lot of experts, she notes, see the approach as too timid by far.

"The bills are directionally correct, but they're not going far enough," said George Halvorson, chairman and chief executive of Kaiser Permanente and the author of "Health Care Will Not Reform Itself."

(We are refiling this post to make the paragraph about the SEC a little clearer for our readers.)

"The American people and I are asking a serious question and one that deserves a straight answer -- why are health insurance costs going up each year?" Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) questioned in a letter (part 1 and part 2) to H. Edward Hanway, the CEO of CIGNA, yesterday. "Are they spending it to make people well when they are sick and keep them healthy? Or is the money they charge going to profits, to executive salaries, and to figuring out how to deny care to people when they really need it?"

Sen. Rockefeller explains: