Aravosis: BREAKING: Sell-out group of Senate Dems cave to GOP, reach "bipartisan deal" on health care
Remember what "bipartisan" means to Democrats. It means we sell out our principles and adopt theirs. Then the GOP votes against the deal anyway. (Think $300bn in tax cuts in the stimulus package.) This really doesn't sound good. It will be interesting, to put it lightly, to see what the White House and Senator Reid have to say.
From AP:After weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits a requirement for businesses to offer coverage to their workers and lacks a government insurance option that President Barack Obama favors, according to numerous officials.
Like bills drafted by Democrats, the proposal under discussion by six members on the Senate Finance Committee would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to any applicant. Nor could insurers charge higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.
But it jettisons other core Democratic provisions in a reach for bipartisanship on an issue that has so far produced little.
- mcjoan adds:
Wow. It took this long for Baucus to come up with that little, and most of it really bad. In fact, possibly worse than what we've got now. If this is what the Senate Finance Committee really ends up with, and Finance takes the lead on the whole package, then it's not worth doing at all. Worse to pass this half-ass, chicken-shit slap on the wrist to the insurance industry so that you can call healthcare reform done and leave it for another four decades, than to do nothing at all.
Progressive Democrats in the Senate need to do what those in the House have done; follow Bernie Sanders' lead and say hell no to this crap. And it should start with the other Democrats on the Finance Committee, since this isn't their bill. It's Baucus Gang's bill, and has nothing to do with the rest of the committee. Given that, they should have no compunctions about rejecting it. And staying through August to come up with something real.
- Attaturk adds:
Well, it appears that after months and months of negotiating health care reform away from the prying eyes of, well, everyone, Max Baucus is on the verge of presenting a bucket of warm spit and calling it bipartisan.
If you listen closely you can hear him counting that health care lobby money.
So thanks Max, thanks ever so much, for absolutely nothing. You're like the bizarro Dos Equis guy.
His reputation is diminishing faster than Sarah Palin's
He had several awkward tweets with Chuck Grassley, just to make a deal
He lives precariously with David Broder's conscience
He is, the least interesting man in the world"I don't always think clearly, but when I do, I do what I'm told by Blue Cross.
Stay healthy my friends."
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
The traditional media is all geared up to declare healthcare dead, or at the very least on life-support, and President Obama's first term doomed to failure because of this. It's an easy template for them--if they talk about the politics then they don't have to bother learning the policy and reporting on the stuff that really matters--how the various policy options would work, what it would mean to average families, or even what happens if reform isn't done.
What they're forgetting is that two out of the three most important people in making this happen--Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi--are committed to getting it done. Here's Pelosi, yesterday.
PELOSI: When take this bill to the floor, it will win. But we will move forward. This will happen. Americans, again, with preexisting medical conditions or concern about losing their jobs or changing their jobs or the health care that is available for their children and their families with a big dose of prevention and the rest can take heart and comfort in knowing that this bill will pass.
KING: When we spoke a few weeks back, you were adamant that the final bill would include a public option.
PELOSI: Definitely.
KING: You gave an interview this week where you were asked if you could support a bill that didn’t have one in the end, and you said, I don’t think so. Is that some softening?
PELOSI: No, no, no, no, the president has said he believes the public option is a way to keep the private insurance companies honest. But he said, if you can find another way to do this, show it to me.
KING: So is that non-negotiable? If the Senate passed a bill that did not have a public option or that had a public option that, say, had a three- or five-year trigger, let’s see what happens, see if we can make reforms, and if we don’t, then a public option would kick in, is that non-negotiable with the speaker?
PELOSI: I think the private insurance industry has had a long enough time to have a trigger. We know what happens left to their own devices. This is about having an alternative, to give much more leverage to the individual. And the president has said, if you like the insurance that you have, you like your doctor, you can keep them. Well, most people, many people feel good about all of that, but they don’t know what’s going to happen to the cost.
And the cost, that’s an accessibility issue. And we know that a family of four — average family of four, their health insurance costs will increase by $1,800 a year, that would be $18,000 by 2020. It’s just not affordable. And therefore not accessible.
There's also President Obama, who will be back on the bully pulpit this week with townhall meetings in North Carolina and Virginia.
And the other thing they keep overlooking? The American public still trusts Obama on the issue, and still wants major reform. Max Baucus needs to keep all this in mind.
Aravosis: CBO undercuts GOP on health care reform
Yglesias: Diversity and Health CareSeems a government-run plan can co-exist with private plans.
More than 160 million workers and family members now get health insurance through an employer. A widely cited study by the Lewin Group, a private health research firm, estimated that more than 100 million people would sign up for the public plan proposed by House Democrats, making it the dominant insurer in the land....
CBO estimates that only 11 million to 12 million people would sign up for the public plan — making it a much smaller player in the market. The government coverage would be available alongside private plans through a new kind of insurance purchasing pool called an exchange. CBO estimated about 6 million of those enrolled in the public plan would be workers and family members of employers that joined the exchange.
Ezra Klein got the following question doing some live-chatting:
Lexington, Va.: Hey Ezra - I really enjoyed your article, but I’m wondering, with all the references to European-style health care, what role homogeneity plays in the success of these systems? Many European countries are far less diverse (economically, ethnically, etc.) than the US, and going beyond Europe, Japan’s population is almost entirely homogeneous. Don’t these systems that you have mentioned depend largely on the ease of applying universal care to a population that doesn’t vary from person to person like the US does?
Ezra Klein: Not really. Some of those countries are more and less diverse than others, for one thing. And it’s not as if Montana, which isn’t very diverse, has an awesome health-care system. It’s arguably the case that there are fewer political obstacles in a more homogenous system because it’s easier for voters to feel connected to one another. But there’s no real reason national health insurance should work with 20 percent diversity but not 35 percent diversity.
To back this up with a bit more in the way of demographic information, there’s no objective measure of which society is “most diverse” but I think in a commonsense way the most ethnically and religiously diverse European country is probably France, which is also the country with what’s probably the best health care system. In a different sense of diversity, Belgium is strongly binational, which creates a lot of problems, but hasn’t prevented them (or Canada for that matter) from constructing a reasonable health care system. Meanwhile, citizens of super-homogenous Japan are extremely healthy but my understanding is that their health care system actually delivers a pretty low standard of care.
I think what you can say about America’s diversity and health care is that segregationist sentiment was a major impediment to creating a universal health care system back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s as there was fear that a national health care system would come under pressure, like the military, to be desegregated
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