Have I mentioned how much I hate the Baucus Plan? What I really hate is how politically stupid it is to even discuss forcing people to buy private health insurance at unaffordable prices. It’s bad enough to force people to buy something from a corporation so that they can drive. We can always adjust our lifestyles in such a way that we don’t need to drive. But we all are subject to the Baucus Mandate, no matter what we do. If we don’t become customers of the very health insurance companies we loathe, we will get slapped with heavy fines. Most of the time, the Republicans distort and demagogue our policies. There is no need to distort this bag of shit. Just tell the truth and the Democrats will think it’s hell.
Any Democrat who willingly even so much as debates the Baucus Plan as something plausible is doing incalculable damage to the cause of health care reform.
So where is a decent bill in the Senate? Where is the House bill? Not rhetorical questions. I’d really like to know what’s in the hopper besides the Baucus bill being rammed down our throats. Perhaps a recap article?
The HELP Bill.
Thanks for the link. At a VERY quick glance, it seems to make the insurance companies regulated monopolies. That’s good. But I see there is no bill number, so is this proposed legislation or a real bill?
The jurisdiction for creating the health care reform bill was delegated to the HELP and Finance Committees in the Senate. The HELP Committee (led by Dodd, in Kennedy’s absence) passed their bill out of committee in July or early August. The Finance Committee, led by Baucus, starts their mark-up next week.
In the House, the jurisdiction was split between three committees:
Ways & Means- Chairman Rangel
Energy & Commerce- Chairman Waxman
Education & Labor- Chairman Miller
They all completed their bills before the August recess.
So, four out of five committees completed their work before all those nutty townhall meetings. They all had a version of the public option.
The key stumbling block has been on how to finance the bill. An additional problem has been an unwillingness of key Democrats on the Finance Committee (Conrad, Lincoln, Carper) to back a public option.
The House has to meld their three bills into one bill and pass it.
The Senate needs Finance to pass their bill, then they need to meld it with the HELP bill and create one bill and pass it.
Then, the single House bill and the single Senate bill have to be melded into one bill (during a Conference Committee) and each house has to pass an identical version.
Messy. Sounds like a long time before we find out what is really going to happen. Meanwhile, the MSM only talks about the Baucus bill, described as “socialist” by at least half of them.
I don’t think insurance as a requirement to drive is a bad idea at all. Perhaps inexpensive liability insurance should be made available so that people aren’t forced to buy a product from whatever private insurance companies are available to them. But a car can be a lethal weapon, so requiring training, a license and insurance in order to operate one seems reasonable to me.
The comparison with mandated health insurance is not a good one.
Also, you can choose to not drive, i.e. taxi, bus, car pool. You can’t choose to not get sick.
most places one can’t get by without a car – even in the Northeast.
That’s why I included car pool. It’s inconvenient, but you actually can get by with the help of co-workers and neighbors, even without public transportation.
but yes, what you say about getting sick – heard some good discussions on that point, from Howard Dean iirc: that health “insurance” isn’t comparable to insuring against say damage to one’s home, because everyone gets sick and everyone has end of life care issues.
You should be licensed to drive, after proving you know the rules of the road and can parallel park, etc. Should you also be forced to pay a corporation to certify you to the state? Should be forced to pay a corporation to give you your license in lieu of the state?
Yes, you should carry liability insurance when you drive. The state should provide you with that liability insurance at cost. At the very least, you should have that option.
Interesting thought. Do assigned risk pools qualify?
So did we dodge a bullet of sorts by NOT having Maxie drop this abomination before August?
Quite possibly. It’s harder to protest something if you don’t have any hard numbers.
Hey, BooMan, let me make your day about Baucus’s bomb by offering a decent comparison to what he’s labored to bring forth. Back during the French ancien regime, the French monarch had a really great tax on salt, the gabelle. The thing that made this tax so pernicious was that virtually everyone was forced to buy a specified quantity of salt every week, whether you used that much or not. Of course, since the French monarchy held salt distribution as a monopoly and it was a revenue generator, the price on salt was hardly subsidized. Naturally, the average French resident loathed the gabelle, which was only abolished in 1790. Guess what happened in 1789 to make that possible? I suspect we’d be looking at a reprise of those events if Baucus the Bourbon were to get his way.
This pile of steaming shit is an insurance company’s wet dream. Hell, they probably wrote the thing. The Finance Committee will try to Rope-a-Dope and polish this turd for a couple of weeks and then it will likely get flushed. I think the plan was to do this with reconciliation all along, while idiots like Lieberman and Conrad jerk off on Sunday talk…
They did!! Sounds like you haven’t been reading Marcy and Jane over at FDL.
Hell, they probably wrote the thing.
bingo!
nobody has answered me this…
what happens if there is NO BILL from the Finance Committee…why can’t we just work with the 4 other bills.
Good discussion by Lawrence O’Donnell of the Huffington Post on Countdown last night. He was a Congressional staffer in a previous life, and provides a decent explanation about why it’s actually better for the overall process if something actually gets out of the Finance committee:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/