With Congress started on what could be an historic overhaul of the nation’s system of paying for medical care, here’s a glossary to help you understand what the policymakers are saying.

'Bend the health care cost curve'

From 2002 to 2007, medical spending in the United States increased by an average of 7.3 percent a year, a far faster pace than the growth in the nation’s income. President Barack Obama and congressional leaders want to “bend the cost curve” — or slow the growth in health care spending — by forcing doctors and hospitals to become more efficient.

Capitation

Capitation refers to the fixed, per-patient payments made to doctors and other health care providers in return for delivering medical care to patients. Governments, insurers, and managed care organizations use capitation to control health care costs. Capitation contrasts with “fee-for-service” systems in which doctors get separate payments for each service they provide.

CBO scoring

The Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan budget estimator for Congress, “scores” a proposed bill by calculating the amount it will either increase or decrease federal spending and tax revenues.

CHIP

The Children's Health Insurance Program provides health insurance to children in low-income families whose parents are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. The program is jointly financed by states and the federal government. It is administered by the states.

COBRA

Under a federal law — the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1985 — a company’s insurance plan must offer continuation coverage to workers after they lose their jobs. But the laid-off worker must pay the full cost of the premiums.

Comparative effectiveness

Comparative effectiveness research examines the relative cost and efficacy of medical procedures in one hospital or region of the country contrasted with another hospital or region, in the hopes of forcing down costs in the more expensive areas.

President Obama has endorsed this approach, saying the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and other institutions “offer the highest-quality care at costs well below the national norm. We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our country.”

Co-op plan

Under a proposal made by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., people without health insurance would be able to purchase it from regional co-operatives, almost like farmer co-ops.

These co-ops would not be run by the federal government, but would compete on cost and quality with the for-profit insurance industry.

Conrad called his co-op idea "an alternative to for-profit insurance companies, so that there's a different delivery model for competition."

'Crowd out'

A "crowd out" is a reduction in private medical insurance coverage caused by an expansion of taxpayer-paid coverage.

Opponents of a taxpayer-paid insurance option say a public plan would compete with private insurance to the point where some private insurers would be "crowded out" of business.

Deficit neutral

Obama has pledged that the insurance overhaul will not add to the projected federal deficits when measured over ten years. New spending will need to be offset by cuts in other parts of the health care system. According to the CBO, the cumulative deficits from 2010 to 2019 will be $9.3 trillion, or about 5 percent of gross domestic product.

Fee-for-service spending

Under a fee-for-service system, a doctor bills the insurance company or the government for each service he or she provides. This contrasts with a capitation system under which physicians receive a fixed sum for each patient assigned to them and the payment does not increase if more services are provided.

According the CBO, “providing separate payments for each service encourages physicians to provide a higher volume of services than they would under capitation arrangements.”

Health care rationing

Rationing uses a mechanism such as a waiting list or a strict national medical budget to allocate limited resources.

In Britain, where overall medical care spending is controlled by the government, the drug rationing agency, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, refuses to recommend some medications for patients with certain advanced cancers, because it judges them to be not cost effective. Patients who decide to pay on their own for a new drug or treatment which is not approved by the agency are ineligible for further care by the National Health Service.

Health IT

Health information technology, or health IT, refers to storing patients’ records on computerized databases which would allow more efficient sharing of patients’ medical histories among doctors, nurses, and others. As of 2008, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, only 5 percent of doctors in the United States had adopted comprehensive health IT systems.

Health insurance exchange

A health insurance exchange system would allow uninsured individuals and small employers to purchase insurance by shopping at a federally-regulated, web-based marketplace similar to a travel web site such as Orbitz. Purchasers would be given a menu of competing plans, mostly private-sector ones, but also one federally-sponsored plan which would compete on cost and quality with the private-sector plans.

Individual mandate

Proposed by some reform advocates, an individual mandate would require that uninsured individuals purchase coverage. It would apply to individuals who were neither poor enough to qualify for Medicaid nor old enough to enter Medicare. Those who failed to comply would be forced to pay a penalty to the federal government.

Medicaid

Medicaid is the primary insurance program for low-income Americans. The states and the federal government share the cost of Medicaid. On average, the federal government pays for 57 percent of Medicaid costs, though this varies from state to state with high-income states bearing more of the burden than low-income states.

About 30 million low-income children and 15 million adults are covered.

The Medicare program — which is distinct from Medicaid — pays for medical treatment for Americans age 65 and older and for people with permanent disabilities.
Medicaid helps about 1 in 5 Medicare beneficiaries to pay their premiums for coverage and to pay some additional costs. These low-income people are called the “dual eligibles.”
According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, the dual eligibles account for more than 45 percent of Medicaid spending for medical services.

Medicare

Medicare is the taxpayer-supported plan that pays for the medical care of 44 million individuals, including most Americans who are age 65 or older.

Medicare Part A pays for hospital and nursing home care.

Medicare Part B covers the costs of physicians’ services and other outpatient care.

Medicare Part C, the Medicare Advantage program, is an alternative to the traditional fee-for-service Medicare. It allows people to enroll in a private plan. The federal government then reimburses the private company for providing Medicare-covered benefits.

Medicare Part D pays for prescription drugs.

Workers’ payroll taxes pay for most of the cost of Medicare, but the people enrolled in the program also pay monthly premiums.

Medicare buy-in

Because they have a higher likelihood of getting seriously ill, older people have greater difficulty than younger people do buying insurance. A Medicare buy-in would allow people aged 62 to 64 who didn’t have employer-provided insurance to enroll in Medicare before reaching the normal eligibility age of 65.

Medicare Payment Advisory Commission

An independent commission of doctors and health policy experts which makes recommendations to Congress on how make medical care more efficient is called the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Obama has endorsed the idea of having this commission’s recommendations on cost reductions take effect unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. Similar to the process used by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to decide which military posts to close, this would help insulate Congress from political backlash caused by cost cuts.

Out-of-pocket payments

Direct spending by consumers for health care goods and services, including co-payments, deductibles, and any amounts not covered by insurance, are called out-of-pocket payments.

Pay-or-play requirement

A pay-or-play requirement would require companies to offer health insurance to their employees or make a payment to the federal government to help pay for coverage of the uninsured.

Public option

A public option is a form of government-sponsored medical insurance that would be offered to the uninsured as one of the choices in the health exchange. Details have yet to be decided on how closely this public option would resemble the existing government plans — Medicare and Medicaid. The president supports a public option and has denied that it is “a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.”

Sin taxes

Taxation of products such as cigarettes, alcohol, and fatty food — items, when used by Americans, can raise the cost of health care for everyone. Health care reform advocates hope that high taxes would persuade Americans to cut their consumption of these products and thus improve their health.

Single-payer plan

A system under which medical care for all Americans would be paid for by the federal government is a single-payer plan. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has introduced a bill that would set up a single-payer, or universal, system. His bill would replace Medicaid, Medicare, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the federal employees benefits plan with a universal package. Sanders would curb, or even perhaps eliminate, private-sector health insurance by prohibiting the sale of health insurance that duplicates benefits provided under the single-payer plan.

Sustainable growth rate

Each year, Medicare sets fees for physicians’ services using a “sustainable growth rate” formula. This target is updated annually to reflect inflation, the increase in the number of Medicare enrollees, and other factors. If actual Medicare spending for physicians’ services has increased faster than the target, the SGR is supposed to automatically reduce future payments for those services.

The CBO estimates that under current SGR policy, physicians will receive about a 21 percent cut in payment rates in 2010. But, in recent years, responding to complaints by doctors, Congress has voted to forego these cuts, which is one reason Medicare’s costs keep increasing.

Tax break for employer-provided insurance

The money an employer pays to buy insurance for a worker is excluded from the worker’s taxable income. According to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, the Treasury misses out on $226 billion a year in revenues because employer spending on health insurance isn’t counted as taxable income. Some congressional leaders see taxing employer-provided insurance as a principal means of raising the money needed to cover Americans who are now uninsured.

TRICARE

The TRICARE program provides care for the military’s uniformed personnel and retirees, and for their dependents and survivors — in all, more than 9 million people. In 2008, the Department of Defense spent $42 billion on TRICARE, about 6 percent of total defense spending. The Congressional Budget Office forecast that TRICARE will consume 13 percent of total defense spending by 2026.

Uncompensated care

Medical care given to a patient who has no health insurance and can’t afford to pay the out-of-pocket costs is called uncompensated care. Hospitals pass the cost of of uncompensated care along to their paying customers.

According to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, this cost shifting accounts for eight percent of the average health insurance premium, or about $1,100 per family per year. American hospitals currently spend over $30 billion a year on uncompensated care with about two-thirds of that amount due to the care of uninsured people, according to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

Sources: Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services; Congressional Budget Office; Kaiser Family Foundation; Senate Finance Committee; The Observer (London); The Urban Institute’s Policy Jargon Decoder.

© 2009 msnbc.com Reprints URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31389142/from/ET/

updated 9:46 a.m. ET, Fri., June 26, 2009