Baucus Plan Under Fire from All Sides

Update: For link to the bill check here.


Well it looks like the gang of 6 could not come up with a proposal,of course the harshest critics of Baucus have come from the left wing of the Democratic party and even as details of the plan trickled out it has already come under attack.

But for now, despite numerous gestures to Republicans, Baucus has fallen short in his quest to assemble a coalition of senators from both parties behind his proposal. Obama also hoped for bipartisan support behind plans for reshaping the nation's $2.5 trillion health care system to hold down costs and cover the uninsured.

''The door's always open -- always hoping that somebody, all six, will be on the bill,'' Baucus told reporters Tuesday evening after the latest meeting of his so-called Gang of Six senators. ''We're just going to keep the door open, keep working, keep discussing.''

Many of the details in the Baucus' bill were already known. Unlike more liberal versions passed by three committees in the House and by the Senate's Health Committee, it shunned liberals' call for the government to sell insurance and relied instead on co-ops to offer coverage in competition with private industry.

Baucus' approach includes a requirement for individuals to buy insurance, with financial penalties for those who don't. Rather than a mandate for larger businesses to provide coverage for employees, they would be required to defray the cost of any government subsidies for which their employees would qualify.

The bill is expected to cost about $880 billion over 10 years, and it tracks closely with the goals Obama laid out in his speech to Congress last week.

Baucus has been working for months with his committee's top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, along with GOP Sens. Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Olympia Snowe of Maine. In the end, Democrats believe Snowe may be the only one to support the bill, though she wasn't committing to that Tuesday night.

Politically Snowe is in a very safe place, having just been re-elected she doesn't have to worry about until 2014 about her political future.

Snowe (Maine), who was one of three Republicans who backed the $787 billion economic stimulus package, was being lobbied heavily by the White House, and some centrists view her refusal to strike a deal with Baucus as troubling. But concerns about how the plan would be paid for prompted her to back away in the hours before its release.“I do have concerns and I’m not sure they can be addressed before he issues [legislation] tomorrow,” Snowe said.

Faced with the prospect of having to pass legislation without Republican votes, Obama’s chief political adviser David Axelrod met with Senate and House Democrats on Tuesday to stress the importance of party unity on healthcare reform — a message most directly aimed at centrists who now are critical to its passage.

Democrats control 59 seats in the Senate. Without a single Republican vote, they would be forced to advance healthcare using a budgetary maneuver that requires only a simple majority.

The Baucus plan contains numerous proposals that many Democrats,and in this case Republicans find onerous,most specifically the taxing of insurance benefits:

Obama and Baucus have suggested paying for a big chunk of reform by levying new taxes on high-cost insurance plans. Specifically, Baucus has suggested a 35 percent excise tax on insurance plans that cost single individuals more than $8,000 a year and cost families more than $21,000.

Snowe’s problem with that plan is that it could impose a heavy tax burden on Maine, which has one of the highest average health insurance premiums in the country. A July study by Harvard economist David Cutler found that Maine, on average, has the fourth-most costly insurance premiums in the country, trailing only Connecticut, Delaware and New Hampshire.

This is similar to the direct taxing of employee health benefits, somthing Obama adamantly opposed during the campaign then waffled about before top Democrats killed it as a sop to Unions. Anyway its clear the Baucus plan that he worked so hard on didnt go a day without being ripped apart by Democrats,for starters:

Rockefeller says he wants a public insurance option — not consumer-owned cooperatives, which are included in the Baucus bill — to force competition with private insurers and lower costs for his constituents, who are among the poorest in the country.

“There is no way in the present form that I could vote for it,” Rockefeller told reporters Tuesday.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who represents a state with one of the largest immigrant populations, opposes plans to block legal immigrants from receiving health care subsidies for five years and to prohibit illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance at full price in a new marketplace known as an exchange. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has raised objections to billions of dollars in annual fees on industry players such as device manufacturers and insurers.

And Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) dislikes a proposal to cut Medicare payments to private insurers that operate Medicare Advantage plans, which he says would adversely affect senior citizens.

As for the GOP:

WASHINGTON — The top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee said Tuesday that he could not support sweeping health care legislation drafted in more than three months of bipartisan negotiations by the chairman of the panel, and several liberal Democrats criticized the bill from the other side of the political spectrum.

The statement by the Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, came just as the chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, put the final touches on his bill to provide health benefits to millions of the uninsured.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Grassley said, “we’re operating under an artificial deadline set by the Democratic leadership and the White House. I’m disappointed because it looks like we’re being pushed aside by the Democratic leadership so the Senate can move forward on a bill that, up to this point, does not meet the shared goals for affordable, accessible health coverage.”

By the way, Conventional Wisdom was saying the Baucus plan was the framework for what Obama might actually sign. Considering the massive disputes that exist its going to be very difficult to iron out the differences between these various groups.