Seven Important Facts in the Baucus Bill’s CBO Report
By: Gregg Levine Wednesday September 16, 2009 8:00 pm

Today, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) released the Chairman’s mark of his health care reform bill along with a CBO report on the legislation. I’ve found seven interesting and important issues in the report.

1. It looked like Baucus purposely left himself a small possible giveaway to liberals. His bill in fact saves $49 billion, which could be used to increase subsidies by that amount while still keeping it budget neutral. A little “look, liberals won something”:

According to CBO and JCT’s assessment, enacting the Chairman’s proposal would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $49 billion over the 2010–2019 period

2. It appears that the CBO agrees with almost every health care reform expert and also concluded that Conrad’s small state-based co-ops are worthless.

The proposed co-ops had very little effect on the estimates of total enrollment in the exchanges or federal costs because, as they are described in the specifications, they seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country or to noticeably affect federal subsidy payments.

Continue reading Sen. Baucus Declares War on American People – $20 billion in Fines to Uninsured – Tax on Healthcare Benefits →

by Randy Shannon

September 15, 2009

In his message posted below Sen. Arlen Specter states his support for the hotly debated public option. The public option was originally proposed as a large inexpensive Medicare- administered plan to allow access to good healthcare for the 46 million uninsured and the millions of under-insured. As the White House slowly moves to accomodate the powerful corporate health insurance lobby, opportunists like Specter are climbing aboard offering support with qualifiers that further water down the public option.

Now the public option will only cover a few million persons. And if Specter has his way it will have to cost no less than what the private insurance companies charge. This means it will be unaffordable and offer no competition to hold down the cost of private insurance. The current legislation being considered does not control the rising insurance premiums. It does call for restraining the outlays for Medicare, even though Medicare is the most affordable and most efficient administrator of healthcare outlays.

The bill makes it a crime for an individual not to buy junk insurance. It’s no wonder that Wall Street is already celebrating the victory of health insurance reform over healthcare reform by bidding up the stock prices of their favorite insurance companies and hospitals.

In a recent Pittsburgh Post Gazette article, Congressman Jason Altmire is quoted saying that he will probably vote for the health insurance bill after he voted against it in committee. Mr. Altmire is a former lobbyist for the Federation of American (for-profit) Hospitals and UPMC.  This is another sign that the bill will favor the large corporate entities such as UPMC and hurt the working people of the 4th Congressional District. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09256/997454-114.stm

See Specter’s message on next page…

Continue reading The Kiss of Death – Sen. Arlen Specter Calls for “Expensive” Public Option in Health “Insurance” Bill →

Hours After Pelosi Backs off on Public Option, Health Lobbyist Announces Fundraiser in Her Honor

By David Sirota, Open Left
Posted on September 11, 2009, Printed on September 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.openleft.com/142589/
 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the first time yesterday suggested she may be backing off her support of the public option. According to CNN, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “said they would support any provision that increases competition and accessibility for health insurance – whether or not it is the public option favored by most Democrats.” When “asked if inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable demand – as her previous statements had indicated  Pelosi ruled out any non-negotiable positions,” according to CNN.

This announcement came just hours before Steve Elmendorf, a registered UnitedHealth lobbyist and the head of UnitedHealth’s lobbying firm Elmendorf Strategies, blasted this email invitation throughout Washington, D.C. I just happened to get my hands on a copy of the invitation from a source – check out this OpenLeft exclusive:

Continue reading The Healthcare Lobby Is Buying Congress – Nancy Pelosi Latest Sellout on Public Option →

How Washington is Screwing Up Health Care Reform–Why It May Take a Revolt to Fix It

 

Published by The Rolling Stone.

Watch Matt Taibbi break down his report on the sad state of health care reform in his blog, Taibblog.

Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose. 

The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Continue reading Can This Government Fix Healthcare? →