CNN 2009-12-26

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this week we've been asking you to send your questions about the health care reform bill, and you actually flooded us with questions. And here today to help us wade¹ through some of the answers, Julie Rovner, the health policy correspondent for National Public Radio. Good to see you.

 Good morning.

And before we get to those questions, Julie, you were one of three reporters, correspondents that had a chit chat with the president yesterday. What were his thoughts revealed to you about where health care reform was going?

Well, he was very pleased of course that the Senate was then on the verge² of passing its bill. Now of course that bill has passed this morning. He said that he thought that the House and Senate bills had a lot in common. In fact he said 95 percent. That may be a little bit overstating the case. Of course the 5 percent that the bills don't have in common are the most contentious³ issues, the public option, of course the government-sponsored plan, abortion⁴ language, how the bills would be paid for. 

So there are still a lot to be worked out between the House and Senate bills, but I think as we've seen, the president is pretty enthusiastic that perhaps Congress is really going to do something that no president and Congress have been able to do in many, many, many decades of trying, and that's...

And did he really exude⁵ kind of an optimism that he just might have a bill on his desk before perhaps the State of the Union scheduled for late January?

He did. He didn't give a timetable but, yeah, I think that's really the thought, that it will take maybe another four or five weeks to get this put together and done and to him.

OK well here are some of the questions coming from you at home, which Julie is now going to answer for us. So this from Jackie who says, "How will this health care bill help families like mine, who don't have and cannot afford to buy health insurance at this time?"