HEALTHCARE UPDATE….Senator Max Baucus is outlining his healthcare reform proposal today, and naturally, now that Barack Obama is in town, he brings the socialism!
I don’t think a single payer health care system makes sense in this country. We are America, we will come up with a uniquely American health care system that’s a combination of public and private.
….I do believe we should not scrap the employer based system. We should maintain it. We should build upon it. But the current vision of the tax code has certain inefficiencies that I believe we can address while still building on the employer-based system.
Wait a second. That’s not socialism at all. What the hell is going on here?
Hmmph. And here I thought the revolution had arrived. Jon Cohn provides a quickie look at the non-socialistic Baucus plan:
It look a lot like the plan Barack Obama touted on the campaign trail: Expanded Medicaid and S-CHIP for the poor; a pooling mechanism that allows individuals and the uninsured to buy coverage at group rates; a new public insurance plan, modeled vaguely on Medicare, that would be available to people buying coverage through the new pool; subsidies to offset the cost of insurance coupled with efforts to restrain the cost of medicine in the long term; and regulations that force insurers to sell to everybody, regardless of pre-existing condition.
But Baucus’ plan will differ from Obama’s in one intriguing, and important, way. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler, it will include a requirement that all people obtain insurance. In other words, it will include an individual mandate. That was a major source of contention during the Democratic primaries. Obama opposed such a mandate, while Senator Hillary Clinton supported it. (As readers of this space know, I think Clinton was absolutely right about this.)
More later as details of his plan percolate through the capitol. (The full policy paper is here.) Overall, it sounds a lot like what we heard during the campaign, with an interesting addition that allows people to buy into Medicare at age 55 if they want, and I very much doubt that mandates will be a huge sticking point with Obama. In fact, he might very well breathe a sigh of relief that someone like Baucus is insisting on it, since it gives him an easy out on the issue.
Bottom line: Republicans will almost certainly try to filibuster whatever the final product turns out to be, but they’re going to have a hard time making it stick. Unlike 1994, Baucus, Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and the president are roughly on the same page, the liberal interest groups are interested in getting something done, not bickering, and even the business community is finally coming around to the need for dramatic action. I give serious healthcare reform an 80% chance of passing before June.
