find coverage for $100 a month or less. he also made this promise. if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. he said he didn t want to interfere with people s relationships with their doctors, but he can t keep both those promises at the same time. if you want a lower price in an insurance plan, you only put the doctors and hospitals in there that will take the lowest reimbursement rates. there are much narrower networks than some people are used to, and that s really how insurance companies can bring down their costs, is they negotiate rates with providers. exchanges have lower premiums in part because they have narrow networks. fewer doctors, fewer hospitals that have agreed to lower payment rates. none of the details about doctors and hospitals is available on the shopping site for healthcare.gov. in fact, the least expensive plan for a family of four costs $718 a month and carries a $5,000 deductible. others cost as much as $4800 a
we re very close. i don t have anything to announce right now but we ve been working all weekend and the staff has been working all weekend and we re very close. we have a structure and framework but nothing i can announce right now. with this potential deal, unemployment benefits would be extended until the end of 2012 and so would medicare payment rates for doctors. and even though this bill has a big price tag, we re told it would not be paid for by new taxes of senior house leadership aide tells us all new spending here is fully offset by spending cuts and government reforms to things like unemployment benefits and a number of weeks a person can be on the jobless insurance program which appears to make it more attractive to members of both parties in the house and in the senate. it s pretty clear at least to me that the payroll tax is going to pass. the question is whether it will have unemployment connected with
what it means for people at home. 160 million americans are going to keep that tax cut for the rest of the year, keeps benefits going to people struggling to reenter the workforce, along with the payment rates for doctors. were you surprised by the concessions from house republicans and what do you make of speaker boehner s remark this is morning? well, at the beginning of this conference, the republicans conceded we need to extend the payroll tax holiday, that we needed to fix the medicare payments for physicians that affect seniors access to health care and continue the unemployment insurance through the remainder of this year. so they really conceded up front the three important goals that president obama set for the conference in which the democrats made our priorities. the issue then became how we were going to pay for it. and the republicans have taken inconsistent positions on this. it s somewhat puzzling to us that some days they say, we have to pay for everything. other day
low a level and they fix those payment rates for the last two decades. it s the government itself that needs to be talking to itself, to figure out what needs to be done, and we know what needs to be done. we could improve this by opening up the market a little bit, let people use more of their own money, and i can assure you, there would be plenty of people flocking back into primary care medicine, because they could get paid. martha: it seems like we ve worked pretty hard to make this a very unattractive profession, sadly, for so many potential doctors out there. i think it s unattractive for some. i think that some doctors are overwhelmed and i understand the volume issue. the flipside is there are a lot of doctors today who are charging for so called level five sophisticated visits who never touch the patient, who claim to have checked your pupils, and are checking all the cranial nerves and billing it for the highest level of service.