What Digby Said

Yet another episode, this one on the Baucus plan.

The problem is the politics. Any plan that forces the uninsured to pay their hard earned money to wealthy private insurance companies under penalty of law is a huge political risk. These are the same companies that have brought us to this place where people are routinely denied the care they were promised, lied to about what was covered, scammed into paying huge sums of money for no security and no guarantee. Health insurance companies have dealt with their customers in bad faith for years and years and now we are being told that everyone must pony up and pay them even more. For all the talk of reform, when you whittle this down, that one fact comes roaring back at you and it sticks hard in the craw of anyone who considers themselves progressive.

The Democrats simply do not understand that as much as many people mistrust the government and believe it is inept and malevolent, just as many mistrust the private sector and believe it is greedy and malevolent --- and those beliefs don't break down as neatly between right and left as one might think. What they are going to do is force the currently uninsured to write a check to a private company for a large sum of money every month, the subsidies for which will show up as some kind of "credit" on their tax returns. How do you think most people are going to mentally and emotionally process that expense? As a good deal or a bad one?

Any plan where my first response is "and this is better than the current system how?" is not a good plan. Oh, but it gets even worse:

The proposal has serious flaws, including the following:

Biasing Hiring and Firing Decisions Against Low-Income Workers

* The proposal would make it considerably more expensive for employers to hire workers from lower-income families than workers from higher-income backgrounds to do the same job. As a result, it would distort hiring decisions. Employers would have strong incentives to tilt hiring toward people who have a spouse with a good income (or have health coverage through a family member), teenagers whose parents make a decent living, and people without children (since the eligibility limit for the subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges will increase with family size). Low-income women with children in one-earner families would be particularly disadvantaged.

As I've said before, there is a wide gulf between not passing anything at all and passing a bill that would be worse than the existing system.

The Baucus plan? Worse than the current system. Really. Tax credits to pay for a system you have to pay for yourself, instead of having it taken out of your paycheck off the top each month. That'll go over well. Everybody will love that.

But that's what the plan does.