It’s not perfect — not even near it — but the health care reform bill passed by the House of Representatives last night is a crucial first step towards the necessary.

It still has to be approved by the Senate, and we all need to remember that it ain’t over til the skinny guy signs. Still, for a major policy that pundits announced mostly dead just a few months ago, it’s remarkably alive and well.

There has been some remarkably shallow reporting on the topic, with not much about what is actually in the bill and a lot about the vitriol surrounding the bill. (Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has a column on coverage today and he doesn’t think the press did such a bad job.) As he notes, though:

It was sooo much easier to write another story about the latest Tiger mistress to go public.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities published some highlights of the bill last week. They include:

–Expanding coverage. Under the legislation, 95 percent of non-elderly legal residents of the United States would have health insurance by 2019. The legislation would expand Medicaid and provide subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase private health insurance. Relative to current law, the bills would reduce the number of uninsured by 32 million by 2019, according to CBO — 1 million more than under the Senate bill alone.

–Reforming health insurance markets. The legislation includes long overdue reforms that would improve access to health insurance for people at all income levels and for employers seeking to provide coverage to their employees. Shortly after enactment, the legislation would bar lifetime limits on benefits and begin reining in harmful insurance-industry practices such as rescissions, under which insurers revoke coverage when beneficiaries become ill. By 2014, the legislation would bar insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums to women and people with pre-existing health conditions, restrict insurers’ ability to charge higher premiums to older individuals, and prohibit insurers from setting annual limits on benefits.

–The legislation also would establish state-based health insurance exchanges to make a range of health coverage options available to individuals and small employers and foster competition among insurance companies based on the price and quality of their products. Plans would have to meet minimum standards regarding coverage and cost-sharing protections for enrollees.

Slowing health care cost growth. The legislation would take a number of steps, particularly within Medicare, to institute efficiencies to lower costs and to improve the quality of care by beginning to change the way health care is delivered. In addition, the legislation includes an excise tax on high-cost health plans, which would help slow the rate of health care cost growth over the long term. The legislation would also extend the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund.

Reforms start to happen soon, under the legislation.

Some reforms would happen soon after the plan becomes law. Within months, insurers that offer coverage of policyholders’ children (including in existing plans) would be required to allow adult dependents younger than 26 to be added to such coverage. In addition, new insurance plans would be barred from excluding children’s pre-existing conditions from coverage and would have to cover certain preventive services at no charge to enrollees. The legislation temporarily increases funding for high-risk pools to provide near-term help to people with pre-existing health conditions, who otherwise face rejection or very high premiums in the current individual insurance market.

Under the legislation, consumers would gain significant protection from harmful insurer practices that are prevalent in the market today. Soon after enactment, both new and existing insurance plans would be barred from placing limits on the dollar value of benefits that an enrollee can receive during his or her lifetime. And insurers would face federal restrictions on their ability to impose annual limits on coverage of specific benefits in new insurance plans and existing group plans, before a broader ban on annual limits of “essential” health benefits takes effect in 2014.

Insurance companies would be required to spend a minimum portion of the premiums they collect on health care and quality efforts, rather than non-health costs such as advertising and administration. Insurers that fail to allocate sufficient resources to health care would be required to provide rebates to their customers to make up the difference.

Maybe my political radar is way, way off, but it’s hard to see how that will do much damage to the Democrats in the November election. Once the screaming from the Right dies down a little, and even if it doesn’t, people are going to begin to understand what this bill does for them, not to them. It will be a huge advantage to the Dems if they play it right.

But then again, it’s the Dems, so who knows whether that will happen.