The Most Nightmarish Health Care Reform Bill Ever
Yesterday, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) finally released a proposal for his committee's health care reform bill -- the framework for the eventual Senate Finance Committee legislation.
Predictably, the Baucus Plan is totally nightmarish. Naked on the subway while being accosted by prostitutes that resemble Chuck Grassley nightmarish. I've been writing about the terrible possibility of such a bill for several weeks, but now it's actually beginning to take shape.
But first, because he's not the most famous or likely political villain, here's some background.
Baucus controls the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over any legislation that revolves around Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and health care in general. So the senator, as chairman, enjoys a remarkable degree of power considering that he only represents 960,000 people in Montana, one of the most sparsely populated states in the Union. And I'm fairly certain that if polled most Americans would say that Max Baucus is the guy who played Thurston Howell on Gilligan's Island.
While the Baucus Plan would impose the usual syllabus of regulations on the health insurance industry, it also includes an individual mandate, making it compulsory for everyone to buy a health insurance plan. I get the idea: mandates are an important step to controlling costs and achieving a universal health care, but mandates should be accompanied by a public health insurance option in order to serve as an "option of good conscience" -- an escape hatch for those of us who have moral objections to being forced under penalty of law to finance the corrupt insurance cartels.
And the Baucus Plan doesn't offer a public insurance option.
So you're basically screwed if you have moral objections to being forced by the government to hand over a chunk of your monthly income to the same corporate criminals who heretofore have engaged in practices that can accurately be defined as death panel-ish: canceling the policies as soon as you get sick, denying claims, refusing to pay for life-saving procedures, or, as we read about this week, randomly hiking the premiums for 114,000 Michigan residents by around 30 percent effective immediately. If you happen to object to financing such corporate practices (past or present), there's no public option waiting for you in the Baucus Plan.
Instead, you would have to buy a private insurance policy or be penalized by the federal government like so:
Penalties for failing to get insurance would start at $750 a year for individuals and $1,500 for families. Households making more than three times the federal poverty level -- about $66,000 for a family of four -- would face the maximum fines. For families, it would be $3,800, and for individuals, $950.
Let me repeat this another way. Max Baucus wants to force us to hand over billions of dollars in free cash to the private health insurance cartels and if we refuse, we'll be fined thousands of dollars if we object to paying these mafia-style tributes to Baucus' dons.
The public option, however, would create an escape hatch for those of us who find such a law to be unconscionable. (The public option would also significantly reduce the overall cost of health care reform and it would foster a more competitive atmosphere in which people with private insurance policies would benefit. See also my list of 10 things about the public option.)
Instead of being coerced under penalty of law to pay our monthly premiums to Aetna, CIGNA, Wellpoint or UnitedHealth, those of us without an employer-based policy could buy affordable, portable and reliable insurance offered by We The People. An inexpensive policy based on a Medicare framework that doesn't finance CEO bonuses and multi-million dollar golden parachutes. A policy whereby 96 cents of every dollar pays for actual medical care rather than junkets, lobbying and other varieties of corporate masturbation we've been unwittingly financing for too long.
You might be asking yourself, though, Why does Thurston Howell want to create such an enormous and compulsory handout to the private insurance cartels?
The short answer is that Baucus receives around $1500 a day from the health care lobby and PACs and he needs to keep his financiers wallowing in their own filth. But a more specific answer can be defined by who wrote the Baucus Plan.
Funny story. Baucus and his staff forgot to delete the name of the author of the plan from the Acrobat version of the document. Whoops!
In the Properties dialogue box of the PDF, in the "author" slot, the name Liz Fowler appears. Fowler is a Baucus staffer who was with the senator in the early part of this decade but left to take a breather in the private sector and only returned to Capitol Hill last year. During her time in the private sector, can you guess where Fowler worked?
She was the VP for Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, the health insurance parent company of Blue Cross. And while Fowler was an executive at Wellpoint, there was this unfortunate but all too typical incident:
Blue Cross of California [parent company: Wellpoint] "routinely" violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such "harsh" treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industrywide. [...]
As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday said that it had fined Blue Cross $1 million -- an amount immediately criticized by canceled policyholders and consumer advocates as too small to matter to an insurer whose parent company, WellPoint Inc., earned $3.1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $57 billion.
Incidentally, Wellpoint is still doing this to its customers.
And so a former executive of a company that was penalized for rescinding the policies of sick people was tasked by Max Baucus with writing potentially the most powerful health care reform proposal to be crapped out of the Senate. No wonder it contains individual mandates but no public option. It's a proposal that snares us all and makes us, in effect, government mandated prisoners of the health insurance industry.
People of all political stripes are fond of repeating lately that the public option isn't the entirety of health care reform. It might not be the only item on the list, but it's surely the most important. It's the glue that holds the entire thing together. Mandates are important in terms of covering everyone and consequently controlling health care costs, but without a public option, a bill with mandates is unacceptable to anyone with a brain and some basic morality.
There's really no way around this. But if Congress drops the mandates, then the bill would fail to effectively control costs and it certainly wouldn't achieve universal (or near-universal) coverage. As such the bill would be mostly a failure.
What's worse is that if anything similar to the Baucus Plan passes -- that is, anything with mandates but no public option -- we will have worked for months, years and decades for health care reform legislation only to achieve a bill that literally forces us to pay the enemy.
Have you thrown up into your own mouth yet?
The Baucus Plan or similar legislation runs so contrary to the core values of most of the netroots and progressive base of the Democratic Party that it would touch off an internal revolt unlike anything we've seen to date. I suspect many independents and some Republicans (the ones who aren't fixing to swipe Charlie Cheswick's cigarettes) would also have a thing or two to say about it as well. The whole thing would be a disaster of epic proportions for the White House and the Democratic Party. And then say howdy to President Mitt Romney and Vice President Liz Cheney.
And yes, it's arguably worse than passing nothing. We might still be uninsured or underinsured, but at least right now we don't have to pay the crooks who will always find cruel and unusual ways to screw us.
The Baucus Plan cannot be passed into law. But regardless of whether it has any legs, healthcare reform must include a robust public option without strings. Without it, the insurance-industrial-congressional complex only strengthens its chokehold on an already asphyxiated system, and extricating ourselves will be nearly impossible.
This is it, folks. The public option must become law.
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WHEN are these politicians, and I mean on BOTH sides of the aisle, going to start working for the American PEOPLE? and NOT the Health Insurance Industry!!! This has become a JOKE! Without a Public Option JUST WHAT is our Government doing other than INCREASING the Profits for the Healthcare Insurance Industry???
RIGHT YOU ARE DMSDZINR!!!
OBAMA-----------YOU ARE OUR LAST HOPE
PLEASE DO NOT DISAPPOINT US
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Who needs republicans when you have democrats like Baucus. This is pretty sad, but what I expected. The Baucus bill is far far worse than doing nothing. The lower middle class are doomed in this country. Under the Baucus bill not only will the borderline poor now be paying banks huge overdraft fees, credit card companies huge interest fees, but the government penalty fees because they can't afford health insurance.
This needs to be at the top of the page, and on any other website that will run it.
Well done Mr. Cesca.
You have a knack for telling it like it is :-)
Gee...shoc
Baucus received money from Amgen, Medtronic, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Schering-Plough, New York Life Insurance and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America.
AARP (a $600 million insurance agent) has an ad HERE at the top of HuffPost saying how great health care reform is. Despite false claims by Robert Reich, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and other big pharma and big insurance lobbyists are in FAVOR of this type of plan.
It was bait & switch all along --- to stick it to the people you need special interests and well-meaning do-gooder activists.
Folks, you've been had.
The Baucus bill blows.
The right is determined to kill the public option, and they have enough votes to do so. Baucus and some of the Blue Dogs are a "fifth column" within the Democratic majority, determined to steer any bill towards a government giveaway to the insurance industry.
Given these facts, what does the President do?
He understands that some form of public option is the only way to contain costs and provide competition of some type; but he also understands that the public option per se (as a government-insured option) is a political nonstarter, despite the fact that over 70% of the public want it.
If I were the President, knowing the above, I would let the rightwing kill the public option, but insert a provision that does nearly the same thing, but under a different name. For instance, provide a plan guaranteed by government, but buying insurance from the industry, at prices negotiated by the federal government.
The plan would still compete with regular private insurance on price, but would provide millions of new customers to the industry; this "carrot" would insure their buy-in, and lessen the impact of other reforms on the market.
This is achievable; a true public option isn't, at least not yet. If we do well in the 2010 elections, we can try again afterwards. But if we fail to get a real reform bill passed now, the 2010 elections are not likely to help the progressive side.
Go Bob!!
YAY.
You know what? These aren't the United States at all. At all. We have morphed into an un-recognisable hodge-podge of Interest groups. Money, education, liberal, conservative, black, white, north, south, east, west, rich, poor, old. young, sick, healthy, smart, (and the downright dumbness of Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh) are all blindly and feverishly pulling on the oar of their own interests. The ship of state is going nowhere but straight to the bottom. So let's keep waving flags and congratulating ourselves about how great we are. The band played on the Titanic too, only they had enough sense to play "Nearer my God to Thee." What interest will we worship as the Tide of History washes over our folly?
I think the solution to the Baucus plan is for everyone with current insurance to cancell it and pay the fine. It would be cheaper for most. How workable would that plan be if massive amounts of citizens opted to just pay the fine?
And, we criticize other countries b/c their politicians are corrupt and take bribes from special interests . . .
As someone on the Guardian/UK website posted, this is the dark side of capitalism showing its ugly face.
So, I guess in answering the question, what's a man worth?, the answer is, whatever number Big Insurance puts on us.
How obscene.
Very informative piece of work.
"This is it, folks. The public option must become law."
Exactly.
Wow! I'm a freedom loving Aussie and I find this paranoia over decent pubic health care amazing.
We've had Public Option for almost 30 years.
I've expounded on this in many of Huffo's threads but let me simply say... America you deserve better, do not believe the Conservative lies.
NB: It took two goes in my country to get universal Medicare established. The Conservatives got rid of it when they got voted back in. The Labor Party re-established it at the next election after that. And although they have undermined it every time they got back into power the Conservatives don't dare try to get rid of it again. What I am getting at here is you have to push HARD for it- it's NOT going to happen through bi-partisanship.
PS: I just found out my wife is pregnant over a fortnight ago :) , two days after we went and had the first ultrasound, yesterday we had the second, all at no cost. We have complete confidence in our system.
Oh. You say fortnight. That's so ....Oh you say fortnight. :-) We just say stupid old 2 weeks here.
Kind of like our stupid old healthcare system. I love my country but we're difficult and we are going to have to push and push and push.
Speaking of pushing. Congratulations on some pushing you're going to be helping with in a few months. Have a happy healthy baby.
Cheers Freesia2, regards from me and wifey. :)
Yeah, we (and the Poms) say Autumn instead of The Fall too... but The Fall is the older English expression!
You've yet to go Metric yet :P but I think your country is awesome.
THANK YOU, BOB!!! I have been telling everyone I know about the affordability trainwreck that this bill & others creates. We need to do some calculations here: anyone above 300% of the federal poverty line (@10,800 x 3 for an individual) will "only," have to spend 12-13% of their annual income on premiums before they get ANY subsidy whatsoever! Likewise, the $66,000-earning family of 4 in your example would have to spend that much before ANY SUBSIDY would apply; and then, the subsidy will be the least amount possible, ie., can only go up to the cost of the least expensive policy! Well, clearly this is not good news for ANYONE with pre-existing conditions OR age (ins companies will be allowed to charge up to 5x higher rates), because this essentially guarantees that they will be REQUIRED to spend 13% of their income on their junk insurance. It is disingenuous to say, in a speech or in any other venue, that "People who cannot afford it will receive subsidies.
A fellow fighter!
I've been pounding about the numbers until I'm hoarse and most of what I get back even from liberals is It's okay or Just wait.
Right on!
Fanned and Faved!
bb
What if enough of us refuse to pay mandatory insurance to the Big Insurance/Mafia Companies? I'm talking a mass boycott of "hell no." If the Baucus plan becomes THE plan, we need to organize this. Then promptly put a draft "Dean in 2012" in play.
And what if, furthermore, enough of us refused to pay any more taxes unless we were given the option to decide how our money is to be spent?
PS I like the draft Dean in 2012 idea.
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