In this second New America weekly podcast, Media Relations Manager Kate Brown sits down with Health Policy Program Associate Director Elizabeth Carpenter to discuss the current state of health reform efforts, the debate over the public option, and the prospects for passing legislation.

The MP3 recording is available below. For more on Carpenter, please click here.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the merged health reform Senate bill will contain a public plan option but states can opt out until 2014. He said the "public option" is not a silver bullet but will boost competition, keep insurers honest, and give people more choices. He said it will add "meaningful reform" to a broken health care system.

Reid is sending his proposed bill to CBO for scoring "in a few hours." At a news conference he stopped short of saying he was positive he had 60 votes, but expressed quite a bit of confidence about health reform. He said he had the support of the White House, and key Democratic negotiators Max Baucus and Chris Dodd.

UPDATE: Statement from Chairman Baucus:

Business Week takes a look at the medical home model, and finds that, lo and behold,  primary care docs can provide high quality coordinated care and boost their income to boot.

Improving patient centered primary care—which means care coordination, prevention, wellness and management of chronic conditions—is a key theme of national health reform, supported across ideological lines. A medical home can take various forms. It can be a large group practice or a solo one like Dr. Peter B. Anderson's in Newport News, Virginia, profiled by Catherine Arnst in the Business Week story. (Or this doctor profiled last year in the Washington Post, a slightly different model). As Cathy writes:

The "home" is the office of a primary-care doctor where patients would go for most of their medical needs. The general practitioner would oversee everything from flu shots to chronic disease management to weight loss, and coordinate care with nurses, pharmacists, and specialists. A 2004 study estimated that if every patient had such a home, the resulting efficiencies might reduce U.S. health-care costs by 5.6%, a savings of $67 billion a year.