D-Day On The Baucus Plan

And now we arrive at the choice: No health care reform at all, or a health care reform plan so horrible that it will make you wish there was no health care reform at all.

So Max Baucus will reveal his long-awaited wet kiss of a bill tomorrow, with subsequent votes in committee in the coming week. We've already seen an outline of it, so we know that it would still cripple people financially who have the temerity to get sick, it would criminalize people who do not buy inadequate private coverage from the insurance industry, it would incentivize employers to offer crappy coverage and discriminate in hiring against people who have no coverage from a family member, and it would not include a public insurance option to compete with private plans. It won't even include a trigger, because the original trigger backer, Olympia Snowe, has decreed that it's a dead letter. Those weak state-based co-ops designed to allow nonprofits like Blue Cross, some of which control 90% of the insurance market, to access billions in government seed money, will be as close as we get in the Finance Committee to a public option. Seemingly, the only reason for the death of the trigger is that Susan Collins said they might lead to a (horrors!) public option, and Snowe probably wants her along as cover for a final bill.

You can pretty much tell what a steaming pile of garbage the Baucus bill would be by the fact that the drugmakers are going all in to support it.

And that's all you really need to know. Everybody's lining up behind the Baucus plan, the White House, Congressional Dems, and the drugmakers and health care industry. They know it's a massive gift to the industry, one that politically will annihilate the Democrats, but something the Republicans will never seek to overturn despite all the protestations they are throwing in front of it.

It's a disaster, and we're walking right into it.