Comparing the Competing Healthcare Proposals

50 million Americans currently live without healthcare. This unfortunate statistic has driven our elected representatives to create a solution, and two competing bills have emerged. Although each bill is hundreds of pages long, the Congressional Budget Office is charged with providing accurate (and digestible) estimates on the cost of these bills. Each proposal has a trade-off: the House version offers considerable coverage, but at a high cost. The Senate version has offered a bill with low cost per capita, but with less overall coverage. We have arranged them side-by-side in the visualization below for easy comparison.

The level of news coverage and public concern over the competing healthcare bills is astounding, but the quality of information about those same bills is disappointing. Although many attempts have been made to make the legislation public, there is little chance that the average American actually has a spare 50 hours (and the attention span) to read through the documents.

So how do we make sense of so much information and still hold onto our sanity? This is the perfect situation for visualization! Take ten minutes and explore this viz. Click through the years to see how exchanges will grow within each competing bill. You may be surprised what you find: in 2013 the Senate Bill will actually be reducing the deficit (though not in subsequent years).

Because information for these bills is being constantly updated, we will make sure to feed the newest information in on a timely basis.