There's one positive political aspect to this epic fight for health care reform. We now know for sure which congressional Democrats have to be vigorously challenged and defeated the next time they come up for re-election.
The health care reform debate has forced the toxic slag to gurgle to the surface and consequently revealed a few Democratic senators who, at every turn in this process, have proved to be far more interested in protecting their own asses by way of protecting the asses of their bosses in the health care mafia.
Suffice to say, Joe Lieberman has to be sending lots of "thank you" gift baskets and ponies and backrubs to the offices of Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. In fact, Baucus and Conrad -- the matchstick men of health care reform -- have been so insufferable, I almost forgot about Lieberman. Almost.
In fact, apart from the Republicans from whom we expected outlandish lies and cartoonish behavior, Baucus and Conrad have been much more obstructionist and damaging to real health care reform, chiefly because they possess a disproportionate level of power in relation to the nine people in the upper Midwest they represent, and because their ideas would be laughable if they weren't so ineffectual and dangerous.
To wit: Baucus Plan is just as craptastical as we all suspected it might be.
First, Baucus' entire goal was to construct a bipartisan plan. Mission accomplished. Insofar as both parties hate it. Just as we predicted, Baucus tailored his plan to appeal to the Republicans who, as it turns out, don't support the plan anyway. For example, one of his concessions to the Republicans was tort reform language which not only won't work, but has also failed to bring in any Republicans (bad policy -- bad politics). Meanwhile, the bill is so diluted and bad that roughly half of the Democrats on the Finance Committee appear to be opposed to it. Good job, senator!
Furthermore, as I described last week, there are individual mandates, but no public insurance option. Baucus included his buddy Conrad's pathetic co-ops which are destined to fail due to their limited bargaining power.
The government subsidies in the Baucus Plan don't extend deep enough into the middle class in order to protect families from massive health care debt if a family-member becomes sick or injured. Put another way, mandates would imprison families and force them to buy insurance policies that could still bankrupt them if they actually need to use their insurance for an emergency situation like an accident or being diagnosed with cancer.
The Baucus Plan also discriminates against low-income Americans. In one of the most awful provisions of the plan, the "free rider" provision, Baucus taxes businesses for each hiree who qualifies for subsidies. So this tax incentivizes businesses to not hire poor or disadvantaged workers. (How this tax is determined is corrected in the UPDATE below.)
The list goes on and on.
By Max Baucus' own estimation, his plan carries a price tag of $880 billion over ten years. The press is tossing some very serious kudos and political cover his way because this is clearly less than the $1 trillion mark. It's also $20 billion less than the number President Obama mentioned in his address to Congress last week. And it's the Baucus Plan that many centrist Democrats -- the budget hawks and fiscal conservatives -- appear to prefer.
Allow me to underline this again. The centrist Democrats prefer a bill that more closely resembles the Baucus Plan which will cost around $880 billion over ten years. Fiscal conservatives prefer this. Lawmakers who are worried about government spending appear to be supporting a plan that would cost around $880 billion.
But wait. If the centrist Democrats were legitimately worried about government spending and deficits, they ought to be supporting the Kennedy Bill (the HELP Committee bill) instead, which, according to the CBO, clocks in at $611 billion over ten years, due in part to the inclusion of the public option.
Unless we use backwards wingnut math, $611 billion is significantly less than $880 billion. So the incontrovertible reality is that the Kennedy Bill is the more fiscally conservative health care reform bill. So why aren't the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives in the Democratic Party flocking to embrace it?
The answers are obvious. One, the fiscal conservatives aren't always fiscally conservative (most of them voted for the Bush wars, the Bush tax cuts and the Bush Medicare Part-D blank check). And two, the Baucus Plan forces you and me to pay more cash to their contributors in the health insurance industry. This works out very nicely for senators like Max Baucus who, as Roy Sekoff pointed out, has pocketed millions in contributions from the health care industry.
So how do the blue dogs and conservadems worm their way around the glaring inconsistency between their so-called "fiscal conservatism" and the cost of the Baucus Plan?
Enter Senator Kent Conrad. Ryan Grim reported Tuesday that Conrad is changing the rules in the middle of the game in order give more weight to the Finance Committee bill and, in the process, "kneecapping" the bills with the public option -- the Kennedy Bill and the House bill. In short, Conrad has asked the CBO to use cost projections that span 20 years instead of the 10 year terms the office had been previously employing.
This will make health care reform more difficult to pass because the cost projections will balloon and will be less accurate to predict over an unwieldy 20 year span -- especially the bills with the relatively new public insurance plan. Plus, due to the political stigma on the more liberal bills, the significantly larger price tags will hurt those bills the most, allowing more room for demagoguery.
Put in medical terms, Conrad has infected all of the reform bills with a virus, and he's calculating that the inaccurately perceived "fiscally conservative" bill will have a stronger chance of surviving the pandemic. He's willing to risk crushing the entire reform effort before he allows the Kennedy or House bills to become law. Yeah, and they say the House progressives are the troublemakers. That's rich.
Nevertheless, the Baucus Plan is better than the current system. But that's kind of like saying, to paraphrase Larry David, it's the "good Hodgkins" -- cancerous, but not as deadly. Either way, their obvious and hackish corruption coupled with this awful plan has made it easy for us to pick the villains out of a lineup. We can be grateful for that, at least. Now it's just a matter of what we do with this stockpile of information.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein, whose blog post about the "free rider" provision is linked here, has revised his post summarizing this discriminatory section of the plan. In short: "The employer will pay the lesser of A) the average subsidy in the exchange times the number of subsidized workers or B) $400 times the total number of workers."
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Vote this Bogus Bill down!
Oh, don't allow me into your 'sacred' chambers 'gentlemen'! For I will, on the peoples' behalf, and without hesitation - insist that you, first - disclose the ulterior motives behind your intransigence and, second - DEMAND that you sign into law a national health insurance plan, with ALL the trimmings and commensurate with your own!
I just can't go on right now - I'm so enraged at you hacks, connivers, puppets of paymasters and insensate charlatans that I fear I'm psychosomatically sickening myself into some awful disease (which may be deemed 'pre-existing' - why not?) I might, to my dismay and chagrin - is NOT covered by my own piddling and questionable 'health insurance plan'!
A torrential toxic rain is about to cause an ordure landslide that will bury the American people further into the quicksand of insolvency and poverty. Its simple to me - we pay premiums, that is, we give whoever the insurer is OUR MONEY on TRUST - trust that they in turn will, after having invested it and created windfall profits for themselves - WILL, when we get sick (and everyone gets sick while alive) - cover the high costs of medical treatment, as they promised and advertised and cajoled us into buying their 'better' policy. Again - our premiums are a priori paid ON TRUST - trust that we won't be immediately be made sicker by having to worry about whether or not some 'fine print' in our contract with these lying pirates (how we DO allow them to con us!) will be used to deny us that coverage!
And the Senators, having the best health insurance plans available - again, paid for ON TRUST by all of us - insist on playing 'circus' political football at our expense...with indifference and hypocritical blather so disconnected by a gulf of power and indolent, impentetratable affluence from the anguish and busted lives of millions of their benefactors who are, hypothetically their EMPLOYERS - that were it in my power, I'd fire the lot of them on the spot!
It's a scam that the Republicans play. Make the bill our way so it's less appealing to the moderate and liberal Democrats, then we will vote it down and bad mouth it. And, in the end, it will fail.
Senator Baucus, who basically excluded his Finance Committee's sub-committee on health in creating this albatross of a health reform bill continued to attempt to work with the 'gang-of'-six' and in the end got nothing once again. Senator Baucus should quit and go back to Montana.
There is no health care reform without a robust public option. For me, that option is basically 'Medicare For All' - a single payer system which cuts the overhead in operation from the 30% of insurance companies to about 3% for Medicare. We need not worry whether these behemoth insurance companies who have a serious conflict of interest - maximizing profits for the share holders - eventually disappear from the landscape. We owe them nothing.
I really wish people would lay off our beloved MAX. Republicans here vote for him because they know he is really one of them. As for the health racket money in his campaign coffers, the media cost of hoodwinking Democrats into believing he is one of them is overwhelming.
There must be a way to correct this if the Senate is to ever really reflect the will of the People.
Cheers!
Since they are a "protection racket" that doesn't protect (think of Jimmy Cagney as a gangster in "The Roaring Twenties"), this plan is asking taxpayers and the currently uninsured to subsidize what, in effect, is the Mafia.
And insurance money corrupts government. And "utilization review" policies probably kill more people per day than the Final Solution--at a profit!
The real plan is to demonstrate the futility of trying to do anything but to accept corporate boardroom dictates.
He is on the take and is just a mouth piece for special interests.He doesn't give a damn for the average American.
In the absence of government acton there is a power vaccum which is filled by the dictates of profit seekers.
The Bacus goal is for the govenment to take up the slack after the corporations skim off their profits.
They then point to how expensive it all is, blameing the government, and liberals for trying.
Single payer works all over the world....but not here. We are too busy protecting the wrong special interests....(what an inclusive word, it can mean the powerless, the handicapped, and the corporate pirates and greedy wall street brokers all at the same time. Anyone the writer wishes to shine negative non-specific light upon)
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92419273
In 2000, health care experts for the World Health Organization tried to do a statistical ranking of the world's health care systems. They studied 191 countries and ranked them on things like the number of years people lived in good health and whether everyone had access to good health care. France came in first. The United States ranked 37th.
Some researchers, however, said that study was flawed, arguing that there might be things other than a country's health care system that determined factors like longevity. So this year, two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured something called the "amenable mortality." Basically, it's a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care. The researchers looked at health care in 19 industrialized nations. Again, France came in first. The United States was last.
Myth 1. It's possible to reach a bipartisan deal on health care -not enough middle ground to split the difference. So the Democratic approach is the one.
Myth 2. That every significant Bill must first pass through Senate Finance Committee!
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/liberals-more-likely-to-get-way-on-health-care-2009-09-17?pagenumber=2