The New Baucus Plan

Posted on 09/07/2009 at 11:07 am by Bob Cesca

Max Baucus has released his new healthcare reform plan. Here’s all you need to know:

1) It mostly sucks. No public option. Because he continues to obsess on bipartisanship.

2) Grassley and Enzi don’t support it anyway. So much for bipartisanship.

Digby observes:

So, no public plan, no co-ops, no trigger. No bipartisanship. No surprise.

Baucus didn’t include a public option, but he included major caps and fees on the health insurance cartel. If he’s going to piss off his financiers anyway, why not include the public option?

Now can we have his original plan from less than a year ago — the one with a robust public option?

UPDATE: The more I read about this draft bill, the more it looks like a junk bill to give cover to the centrists. But of course this is cover in a make-believe world in which shit is good. In reality, this Baucus bill is really effing bad and it will have a very short life span. And if it doesn’t, the political life spans of the Democrats who vote for it will be almost as short. Anyway, I digress. This looks like a centrist bill for the sake of having a centrist bill reconciled with the HELP bill. In other words, the Baucus bill — if it makes it out of committee — will be watered down in reconciliation, then again in conference. And at the end of the day, Baucus and his fellow cowards and crooks can say they tried to do their duty: to pass an unprecedentedly huge corporate windfall.

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  • Nanotyrannus

    “Baucus didn’t include a public option, but he included major caps and fees on the health insurance cartel. If he’s going to piss off his financiers anyway, why not include the public option?

    My take on that is a public option would require a huge infrastructure change, people would like it, it would have some measure of success, blah blah blah. It would be harder to kill years down the road. Much harder. Caps on fees and other laws reigning in health insurance industry abuses could be easily legislated away later on once the Republicans controlled Congress again. And they will. In some form or another they’ll be back and one day they will have the majority.They can’t introduce anything that has a chance of success. It has to be killed now before it even gets off the ground. Baucus knows this. If he believed in the public option, he’d put it in his bill then fight like hell to get other Democrats in the Senate on board. Instead, he keeps making excuses about how he needs to bring a bill that will pass the Senate. He’s not on our side.

  • Eric

    Well, maybe this explains the enigmatic smile I’ve been seeing on Baucus’ face the last month or so. To lift a phrase from the link, maybe he’s been chewing on this shit sandwich for a while.Screw it. Get the damn thing out of committee. Fix it in conference.

  • http://tarackian.deviantart.com J M Ashby

    Baucus is a con artist.

  • Eric

    The more I study this plan I can’t, for the life of me, see this as anything more than a clay pigeon. Yeah, it imposes fees on insurance companies issuing certain types of policies, but, as pointed out elsewhere, the industry has essentially said “We’ll just pass those along to the consumer”.This ‘bill’ does nothing to bring premium costs down. I can’t see it as anything but DOA.

  • ceu

    from what I read, it will probably not make it out of committee.This whole “Gang of Six” notion is absurd.

  • Jan

    This ain’t gonna fly. What I don’t get and I haven’t read all the fine print is how are 50 million people going to get insured? By hoping the insurance companies will straighten up and fly right so we uninsured can buy their junk insurance? They will lower their premiums and we will get tax cuts and subsidies so we can afford Blue Cross? They will regulate themselves and obey the laws in this bill?Excuse me for being so ignorant. I just don’t get how this will insure everyone. And still pay out billions.