I was looking for a clear explanation of yesterday’s health reform news, and I thought I’d found it in a short sidebar on the AP wire: “Health Care Issues: Public Plan Compromises,” the hedline read. But the piece was a disappointment. Instead of a list of bullets on what is and is not in the House bill introduced yesterday, I got a brief rehash of the politics: It’s controversial. Dems think it will lower prices; Republicans don’t.

Then, in a paragraph labeled “What it means,” I got more politics, and discussion of triggers, liberals’ preferences, and state options that are not in the bill.

One of the better pieces I found was by Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Washington Bureau. “There was rock music instead of trumpets as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow House Democrats used every flourish Thursday to frame their new $894 billion health care measure as historic legislation on par with the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965,” she wrote. That’s fair enough; yesterday’s announcement of the House bill was more fanfare than anything else, and Lochhead captures that.

Then she went on, in fewer words than the AP, to tell me what it means:

“The nearly 2,000-page bill would transform the health care landscape. Many of its consequences would remain unclear for years to come. There are serious questions about its effect on budget deficits, despite claims to the contrary, and it does not contain the most robust option of a government-run insurance plan that Pelosi and liberals wanted.

“But at a minimum, the 10-year plan would greatly expand coverage to an estimated 36 million more Americans – up to 96 percent of all citizens – and immediately ban insurance companies from canceling policies when people get sick and capping lifetime benefits.”

That’s a pretty good summary of a very complicated story.

Kaiser Health News, which specializes in health reform and health policy, was also disappointing. As far as I can tell on the home page, the staff-written stories are features off the news, including a piece on corporate wellness programs, on a detail in the Senate finance committee bill, a story on a Tulsa hospital, and a piece on women’s insurance rates. All good stuff, probably; I didn’t read it, because I wanted an explanation of yesterday’s news.

What Kaiser did have was a column called the Daily Health Policy Report. The lead item there was something hedlined, “House Democrats Hail, Question Health Reform Bill.” Some like it, some don’t–not exactly big news there. Below the hedline was not a story, but a roundup of news tidbits from other news organizations. It was chuck full of information–too much information, and too dense to read more than a few grafs without clicking elsewhere.

Janet Adamy does a nice job in The Wall Street Journal of laying out the principal items in the bill and the politics. But for some reason, she confuses the cost of the bill. In the second graf, she caught my eye with a sentence that said the bill “will spend $1.055 trillion, largely to expand health insurance.” Everyone else records that the cost will be closer to $900 billion.

That’s in Adamy’s second graf. In you scroll down to the 10th graf, she writes, “The CBO said Thursday that it estimates the net cost of the bill at $894 billion over a decade.” So which is it?

Others:

Ezra Klein blog in The Washington Post: Will the public plan have higher premiums than private insurance? It’s an interesting angle I didn’t see anywhere else.

Tom Curry of msnbc.com sets up a straw man: Fact or fiction? Pelosi bill in danger, is the hedline. Don’t bother clicking on it; it’s fiction, as Curry admits.

Jacob Goldstein of The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog picks one piece of the Pelosi bill and explains it nicely: House Bill Would Allow Feds to Negotiate Medicare Drug Prices.

And to take back some of my criticism of the AP, Dave Espo, in what appears to be the main story, writes a nice, compact, informative lede: “House Democrats proposed legislation Thursday to extend health care to tens of millions who now lack it, impose restrictions on private insurers and create a government-run insurance option for consumers.” That’s the way it appears on the website of the Detroit Free Press.

- Paul Raeburn

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