Yesterday, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) finally released a proposal for his committee's health care reform bill -- the framework for the eventual Senate Finance Committee legislation.
Predictably, the Baucus Plan is totally nightmarish. Naked on the subway while being accosted by prostitutes that resemble Chuck Grassley nightmarish. I've been writing about the terrible possibility of such a bill for several weeks, but now it's actually beginning to take shape.
But first, because he's not the most famous or likely political villain, here's some background.
Baucus controls the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over any legislation that revolves around Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and health care in general. So the senator, as chairman, enjoys a remarkable degree of power considering that he only represents 960,000 people in Montana, one of the most sparsely populated states in the Union. And I'm fairly certain that if polled most Americans would say that Max Baucus is the guy who played Thurston Howell on Gilligan's Island.
While the Baucus Plan would impose the usual syllabus of regulations on the health insurance industry, it also includes an individual mandate, making it compulsory for everyone to buy a health insurance plan. I get the idea: mandates are an important step to controlling costs and achieving a universal health care, but mandates should be accompanied by a public health insurance option in order to serve as an "option of good conscience" -- an escape hatch for those of us who have moral objections to being forced under penalty of law to finance the corrupt insurance cartels.
And the Baucus Plan doesn't offer a public insurance option.
So you're basically screwed if you have moral objections to being forced by the government to hand over a chunk of your monthly income to the same corporate criminals who heretofore have engaged in practices that can accurately be defined as death panel-ish: canceling the policies as soon as you get sick, denying claims, refusing to pay for life-saving procedures, or, as we read about this week, randomly hiking the premiums for 114,000 Michigan residents by around 30 percent effective immediately. If you happen to object to financing such corporate practices (past or present), there's no public option waiting for you in the Baucus Plan.
Instead, you would have to buy a private insurance policy or be penalized by the federal government like so:
Penalties for failing to get insurance would start at $750 a year for individuals and $1,500 for families. Households making more than three times the federal poverty level -- about $66,000 for a family of four -- would face the maximum fines. For families, it would be $3,800, and for individuals, $950.
Let me repeat this another way. Max Baucus wants to force us to hand over billions of dollars in free cash to the private health insurance cartels and if we refuse, we'll be fined thousands of dollars if we object to paying these mafia-style tributes to Baucus' dons.
The public option, however, would create an escape hatch for those of us who find such a law to be unconscionable. (The public option would also significantly reduce the overall cost of health care reform and it would foster a more competitive atmosphere in which people with private insurance policies would benefit. See also my list of 10 things about the public option.)
Instead of being coerced under penalty of law to pay our monthly premiums to Aetna, CIGNA, Wellpoint or UnitedHealth, those of us without an employer-based policy could buy affordable, portable and reliable insurance offered by We The People. An inexpensive policy based on a Medicare framework that doesn't finance CEO bonuses and multi-million dollar golden parachutes. A policy whereby 96 cents of every dollar pays for actual medical care rather than junkets, lobbying and other varieties of corporate masturbation we've been unwittingly financing for too long.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-most-nightmarish-heal_b_281214.html