The Baucus Bill's Bad Math: Nate Silver

FiveThirtyEight: The Baucus Bill's Bad Math

The AP may be right that Baucus's bill will cost less than $1 trillion, but it accomplishes that by shifting the burden to middle-income families, some of whom have poor balance sheets and will face a really tough choice between paying for health insurance they can't quite afford and facing some kind of penalty. Odds are that many of them will take the penalty, which is why coverage probably won't expand very much. Or, the enforcement mechanisms could be more stringent, in which case they'll have to buy health care, at the cost of reducing their spending in other areas -- and in probably being very teed off at the Democrats who passed the bill**.

This is a pretty poor combination of attributes for a health care reform bill to have.

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