Sen. Ben Nelson has reached an agreement with Democratic leaders on health care reform, senators say.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Last night I was up late covering the senate vote on health care for CNN. The number of e-mails I was receiving while discussing this on air was staggering. I realized that as much as we talked about cloture and reconciliation, most people who didn’t read the 2,000+ page bill (which is most everyone) really wanted to know what this bill means for them. They didn’t care as much about the compromise that was struck by Sen. Ben Nelson, which would obligate the federal government to pick up the Medicaid tab for his state of Nebraska into perpetuity. They are still not sure if a public option is a good thing or not, and they aren’t sure how the exchange would work for them. In short, there is a collision of politics and health care, and sometime the impact on individuals gets a little lost in the shuffle.

I want to use this blog as a platform to try and address some of your specific question and to also throw out some key information that may have flown under the radar. I will start with a number. 2014. This is the year most of the provisions of the bill would kick in under this version of reform. That’s right – four years away. Many people think health care reform in binary terms. One moment there is a vote, and the next moment you have it. Many wish it were that easy. It is true that children may benefit earlier in some areas, but for the vast majority of the more than 40 million uninsured, things aren’t going to change significantly for a few years. And, speaking of the more than 40 million uninsured, this bill won’t impact all of them, but instead roughly 31 million.

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The Senate hopes to vote on its health care bill before Christmas

CNN’s Political Unit

Senate Democrats claimed a major victory this weekend after voting to end debate on their version of the health care bill.

The Senate is on track to hold a final vote on Christmas eve, but there's still a long way to go before a bill is on President Obama's desk.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about what's in the House and Senate health care bills and what's next.

Where does the health care debate stand?

The House passed its version of health care reform last month. The Senate, which follows different procedures than the House, is slated to vote on its version of the health care bill before Christmas.

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Senate Democrats claimed a major victory this weekend after voting to end the Republican filibuster on their version of the sweeping $871 billion health care bill. The 60-40 party line vote kept Senate Democrats on track to pass the bill on Christmas Eve.

Go here to view the full Senate Bill (PDF)

The House of Representatives passed a sweeping health care bill by a vote of 220-215 on November 7. The House Democrats needed 218 votes to ensure passage of the bill.

Go here to view the full House Bill (PDF)

Time

As President Obama ramps up his efforts to overhaul the country's health-care system, these are the personalities on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue who will most likely determine whether he succeeds or fails

Go here to view the top 10 Healt-Care-Reform players.

Support for the health care reform bill that Democrats are pushing through the Senate has risen six points since early December.

CNN

Support for the health care reform bill that Democrats are pushing through the Senate has risen six points since early December, according to a new national poll, and although a majority of Americans still oppose its passage, only four in ten agree with Senate Republicans that the bill is too liberal.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Monday, also indicates that President Barack Obama's approval rating has experienced a similar six-point rise.

According to the poll, 42 percent of Americans, based on what they've read or heard about the bill, support Senate Democrat's legislation. That's up from 36 percent in a poll conducted December 2-3. Nonetheless, a majority of people questioned in the survey, 56 percent, oppose the bill.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted Wednesday through Sunday, as Senate Democrats were negotiating a final health care bill, but before a crucial party-line vote early Monday morning to end debate, a huge hurdle to eventual passage of the legislation that the Democrats successfully were able to jump.

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Cynthia Nixon is speaking out against provisions in the House and Senate health care bills that limit coverage for abortions.

Breeanna Hare
CNN

It's been a little more than a week since Cynthia Nixon flew back from filming "Sex and the City 2" in Morocco, and she's already diving headfirst into the debate surrounding abortion and health care reform.

Nixon, a longtime abortion rights activist, says she can't keep quiet about the recent health care bill amendments that would limit insurance coverage for abortions.

"It's a very basic female right that we need to protect," Nixon said. "What's so frightening about this Stupak ban is that he's found a backdoor way to basically not cover abortion for the vast majority of American women."

The Stupak-Pitts amendment, written by Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and Republican Rep. Joseph R. Pitts of Pennsylvania, is a point of contention in the House health care bill. The amendment would limit funds in the health care bill, preventing subsidies from directly paying for abortions and also from paying for any insurance plan that covers abortions.

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David Frum
Special to CNN

I wanted to support President Obama's health care reforms if I possibly could.

The U.S. health care system costs too much, delivers too little and excludes too many. Americans pay 60 percent more per person for health care than any other nation. Yet Americans rank only 41st in life expectancy and live with the paralyzing fear that the loss of a job means the loss of coverage.

Rising health care costs are devouring worker pay. Employers pay 25 percent more per hour on average for labor in 2006 than they did in 2000. Yet not one dime of that extra money reached workers. All of it was gobbled up by the surging cost of health care benefits. The typical worker actually earned less after inflation in 2006 than in 2000.

Health care drives federal spending. The U.S. government will spend twice as much this year on Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs as on national defense, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Ted Kennedy believed that health care for all citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege

Victoria Reggie Kennedy
The washington Post

My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars - and competing interests - were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole.

Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have been done a long time ago. He predicted that as the Senate got closer to a vote, compromises would be necessary, coalitions would falter and many ardent supporters of reform would want to walk away. He hoped that they wouldn't do so. He knew from experience, he told me, that this kind of opportunity to enact health-care reform wouldn't arise again for a generation.

In the early 1970s, Ted worked with the Nixon administration to find consensus on health-care reform. Those efforts broke down in part because the compromise wasn't ideologically pure enough for some constituency groups. More than 20 years passed before there was another real opportunity for reform, years during which human suffering only increased. Even with the committed leadership of then-President Bill Clinton and his wife, reform was thwarted in the 1990s. As Ted wrote in his memoir, he was deeply disappointed that the Clinton health-care bill did not come to a vote in the full Senate. He believed that senators should have gone on the record, up or down.

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Medical costs contributed to more than 62 percent all personal bankruptcy filings in the US in 2007.

Elizabeth Edwards and Sheldon Whitehouse
Special to CNN

When 3-year-old Finnegan Burns fell ill with complications from cystic fibrosis, his parents did what any loving parents would do. Kerry and Patrick Burns put their lives on hold to see their son through his medical travails.

Surgery after surgery, hospital after hospital, they remained by their child's side as he fought to recover.

This past March, at age 4½, Finnegan lost his battle with this terrible disease.

Following the indescribable anguish that comes with the death of a child, Kerry and Patrick might have hoped to resume their jobs and begin the process of moving forward with their lives.

What should have been a private and quiet period has instead been marked by a mountain of medical debt, home foreclosure and bankruptcy.

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Evan Glass
CNN Congressional Prodcuer

Tensions stemming from the prolonged debate on health care flared Thursday afternoon when Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who was the presiding officer, refused to let Sen. Joe Lieberman finish his speech on the senate floor.

Lieberman, the bane of the Democratic Party's liberal base because of his opposition to creating a public option and expanding Medicare, was speaking about preserving the Medicare trust fund.

After his allotted ten minutes, Lieberman – an independent from Connecticut who sits with the Democratic caucus – asked for more time to finish his speech, a request customarily granted in the venerable chamber.

"In my capacity as the senator from Minnesota, I object," replied
Franken.

"Really?" Lieberman asked, seeming surprised by the rejection. "Okay," he continued with a chuckle, "I don't take it personally."

Immediately following the exchange, Lieberman's closest Republican ally, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, came to his defense.

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An abortion demonstrator protests a clinic in Nebraska.

Orrin Hatch
Special to CNN

The Democratic health care proposal being debated in the Senate not only contains large new taxes, enormous government expansion and huge spending, but I'm convinced it also seeks to allow federal funding for abortion - something 61 percent of Americans do not support, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey.

Recently, the House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill containing language that would safeguard the rights of the unborn, and also prevent medical providers from being coerced into performing procedures that violate their conscience.

However, the health care reform bill introduced by Harry Reid, D-Nevada, in the Senate does not contain similar protections. To be clear, the language in the Reid bill on abortion is significantly weaker than that of the bill that passed in the House last month.

I have major concerns about how effective the weak language in the Reid bill will be. The one thing we know is that coverage of elective abortions in the government-operated health plan (or the public option) would be decided by the secretary of Health and Human Services. I am certain that federal subsidies would ultimately pay for insurance coverage used to cover elective abortions.

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Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, discusses health care legislation with reporters in Washington last Tuesday.

John Feehery
Special to CNN

Winston Churchill once exclaimed, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."

Joe Lieberman knows that exhilaration better than most.

In 2006, the Democratic establishment took a shot at Mr. Lieberman, and it missed.

Now, the Connecticut senator is dictating the terms of a health care package that could determine the political future of the party that tried to end his career.

Predictably, the left wing of the party has decided to attack, with all of its might, their former vice presidential standard bearer. They have called him a traitor, sell-out and worse.

They have attacked his wife's career - she lobbies for funding to end breast cancer and formerly worked for insurance companies.

Think Progress, a left-wing group, has launched a campaign to get Harry Reid to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes Lieberman "seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score."

John McCain, Lieberman's closest friend in the Senate, has called these attacks a "disgrace."

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President Obama speaks after White House meeting, joined by Sens. Chris Dodd, Max Baucus and Harry Reid.

Gloria Borger
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Democrats in Congress, already worried about their dim prospects in the 2010 midterm elections, have been thrown in a tizzy about something else that could reduce their majority: retirements.

They are four departures down and worried about more members leaving districts that have grown more competitive. And they're right to be concerned: Districts without any incumbent running often wind up switching to the other party.

But there's much more to worry about. Consider the results of a recent "open seat" special election for the state senate in a Democratic district in rural eastern Kentucky: Republican Jimmy Higdon beat the Democrat Jodie Haydon by tying him to, of all things, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

"Congress is out of control," one effective ad intoned, "and [Haydon] will bring Nancy Pelosi's one-party control of government to Frankfurt."

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The pharmaceutical and health products industry is the year's top industry, in terms of lobbying dollars spent.

Center for Responsive Politics

How much did drug makers spend to lobby the federal government? The pharmaceutical and health products industry is the year's top industry, in terms of lobbying dollars spent.

Take a look at a list of lobbyist spending, by sector.

And read more about how Big Pharma may have played a role in killing a proposal that allows pharmacies and wholesalers to import U.S.-approved medication from Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, where drug costs are far lower because of price controls.

In a survey from the Journal of the American Medical Association, 94 percent of patients preferred seeing a primary care doctor first for their medical issues.

Rahul Parikh and Kevin Pho
Special to CNN

America is closer to meaningful health care reform than at any time in its history. As we have all witnessed, finding a way to both provide every American access to affordable health care while seeking to control health care costs has not been easy.

Many of the proposed solutions have led to sharp disagreements, with contention surrounding what role government should play.

One goal all sides can agree on, but have yet to meaningfully address, is the need to end the crisis of primary care in the United States.

Without taking steps to fix it, any attempt at reforming our health system cannot succeed.

Consider that the number of patients without a primary care doctor is estimated to be 60 million, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. Most patients want their medical care to be consolidated at a single office, provided by clinicians who know them well. In a survey from the Journal of the American Medical Association, 94 percent of patients preferred seeing a primary care doctor first for their medical issues.

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