The Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993 (S. 1770, abbreviated HEART) was a health care reform bill introduced into the United States Senate on November 22, 1993 by John Chafee, who was then a Republican senator from Rhode Island. It was also co-sponsored by eighteen other Republican senators, including then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. It was read twice in the Senate, but was neither debated nor voted upon. Many of the ideas in the bill were originally proposed by Stuart Butler in 1989, when he worked at the Heritage Foundation. It was introduced to keep another 1993 healthcare proposal, which had been unveiled earlier that year by then-President Bill Clinton, from succeeding. As a bipartisan bill, it was one of a few comprehensive health care reform bills not to be introduced along party lines (as of 2008).
It shared many important features with the Affordable Care Act, which was unveiled by President Barack Obama in 2010 and signed into law on March 23, 2010, including the individual mandate. However, there were some differences between HEART and the ACA, including that HEART did not require employers to contribute to the cost of their employees' premiums, while the ACA does. Also, HEART did not expand Medicaid like the ACA originally required, and HEART, unlike the ACA, included medical malpractice tort reform.
