According to its sponsors, it would guarantee universal, affordable, comprehensive, portable, high-quality, private health coverage that is as good or better than Members of Congress have today; A 2008 preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded it would be "essentially" self-financing in the first year that it was fully implemented.
[4] Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), the bill's two sponsors, asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to provide a preliminary analysis of a version of the Healthy Americans Act.
[9] After Obama became president-elect, Wyden and Bennett and the bill's cosponsors wrote a letter to him on November 20, 2008, recommending seven goals for health care reform legislation, goals reflected in HAA:[10] Wyden characterized HAA as "harness[ing] the Democratic desire to get everyone covered to the Republican interest in markets and consumer choice" and one that had a reasonable chance of getting 70 votes in the U.S.
[2] In a July 1, 2009 interview, Obama said he agreed "with '90 percent' of Wyden's thinking" but called HAA "radical"; according to The Oregonian:[11] In the July 27, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg lamented that HAA is "going nowhere" and commented on the existing employer-based health care system:[12] [W]e're missing the boat most completely by sticking with a workplace-based system that no longer makes sense.
Instead, Democrats are poised to pass legislation that spends an additional trillion dollars, fails to restrain spending, and shores up an anachronistic employer-based system.In November 2008, The Hill pointed out that the Act, despite its two-year head start and its cosponsors from both parties, was in competition with the (then-)undrafted proposals in the works from Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, and Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
[4] In June 2009, just after the CBO announced that the then-current draft of the bill from Baucus' Finance Committee would increase the federal budget deficit by $1.6 trillion during its first decade and would leave millions of people uninsured, the Wall Street Journal characterized the "less-radical" HAA as "Wyden's Third Way" and pointed out some key differences between the majority's proposal and HAA:[2] The plans favored by Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy or President Barack Obama rely on a "public option" in which government insurance would supposedly "compete" with private insurers, a move many see as leading to a single-payer system.
"David Brooks of The New York Times provided evidence of the political impediments to HAA, citing an incident witnessed during a May 12, 2009 hearing during which the Senate Finance Committee heard from a "vast majority" of over a dozen experts from the right and the left who "agreed that ending the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits should be part of a reform package"; according to Brooks, Wyden pointed out to those in attendance that HAA repeals the exemption and provides universal coverage", a comment provoking what Brooks characterized as an "exasperated" look that made it clear that the idea wasn't going to part of his committees legislative drafts.
[13] Brooks pointed out that "senators don't run things[, c]hairmen and their staffs run things"; he acknowledged there are "brewing efforts to incorporate a few Wyden-Bennett ideas" but pointed out the "stiff resistance to the aspects that fundamentally change incentives", resistance originating in "committee staffs [that] don't like the approach because it's not what they've been thinking about.
"[13] According to an analysis published by FactCheck in May 2009,[14] radio advertisements run by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the National Education Association told only "half the story".
FactCheck cites a Lewin Group analysis that said "all families that are currently insured (the target of the labor ad) and have income of less than $150,000 a year would see net savings under Wyden's plan."