Every year or two, I get an e-mail from my former housemate in France asking me to help make sense of some raging American political issue – impeachment, the electoral college, superdelegates – that is getting regular coverage abroad but which is largely unfathomable if you’re not fully immersed in our political system. On Christmas Eve, after the Senate’s passage of the health care bill, the latest e-mail came from Maxime.  If I had a few minutes (ha!), could I help him understand the stakes in the health care reform debate, especially the public option?  My response oversimplified and only touched on a small portion of the legislation, but tried to explain the crux of what the House and Senate bills would do in ways a non-expert can follow. Assuming this may be of some value to a few Americans as well, here is a slightly modified version of what I wrote him:

In the US, there are three main ways that people get health insurance. According to the US Census Bureau:

* about three in five (59 percent) are covered through private insurance provided through their employer or the employer of a family member;
* about one in three (29 percent) are covered through the government – primarily through Medicare, a program for the elderly, or Medicaid, a program for the poor;
* about one in ten (9 percent) buy insurance for themselves on the individual market. Read the rest of this entry »