Best Quote of the Day

"Take Max Baucus. Please! He's the lightweight Montana Democrat to whom President Obama entrusted the heavy job of shepherding health care reform through the upper chamber. It was like asking Tweety Bird to lift a bowling ball."

~ Jim Hightower ~ Why Was a Lightweight Montana Senator on the Finance Committee Tasked to Take on Health Care Reform?

Here's a Commentary on Max Baucus:


Cartoons of the Day:

Bob Englehart, copyright 2009 Cagle Cartoons

"Gang of Six"

Baucus (left) and Grassley hatch a plan

The dictionary defines the word "gang" as an organized group of criminals. Robert Reich wants to know why are 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats, led by Senator Max Baucus and known as the "Gang of Six", Deciding Health Care for Three Hundred Million of Us.

Last night, the so-called "gang of six" -- three Republican and three Democratic senators on the Senate Finance Committee -- met by conference call and, according to Senator Max Baucus, the committee's chair, reaffirmed their commitment "toward a bipartisan health-care reform bill" (read: less coverage and no public insurance option). The Washington Post reports that the senators shared tales from their home states, where some have been besieged by protesters angry about a potential government takeover of the nation's health care system.

It's come down to these six senators. The House has reported a bill as has another Senate committee, but all eyes are fixed on Senate Finance -- and on these three Dems and three Republicans, in particular. But who, exactly, anointed these six to decide the fate of the nation's health care?

I don't get it. Of the three Republicans in the gang, the senior senator is Charles Grassley. In recent weeks, Grassley has refused to debunk the rumor that the House's health-care bill will spawn "death panels," empowered to decide whether the sick and old get to live or die. At an Iowa town meeting last Tuesday Grassley called the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi "intellectually dishonest" for claiming the opposite. On Thursday Grassley told the Washington Post that Congress should scale back its efforts to overhaul health care in the wake of intense anger at town hall meetings. But -- wait -- the anger is largely about distortions such as the "death panels" that Grassley refuses to debunk.

This week on Fox News Grassley termed the House bill "the Pelosi Bill," and called it "a government takeover of heath care, exploding the deficit because it's not paid for and it's got high taxes in it."

I really don't get it. We have a Democratic president in the White House. Democrats control sixty votes in the Senate, enough to overcome a filibuster. It is possible to pass health care legislation through the Senate with 51 votes (that's what George W. Bush did with his tax cut plan). Democrats control the House. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is a tough lady. She has said there will be no health care reform bill without a public option.

So why does the fate of health care rest in Grassley's hands?

It's not even as if the gang represents America. The three Dems on the gang are from Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota -- states that together account for just over 1 percent of Americans. The three Republicans are from Maine, Wyoming, and Iowa, which together account for 1.6 percent of the American population.

So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that's what I'm repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They'll tee-up the final bill," says someone who should know.

The Gang needs to be kicked out!

Robert Reich is the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Stop Max Baucus

Peter Dreier offers an interesting perspective in his article, Is Max Baucus the New Phil Gramm?

Is Max Baucus about to do to America's health care system what Phil Gramm already did to the nation's banking system? Let's hope someone stops Baucus before it's too late.

Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican, was a free market zealot who was more responsible than any other politician for the mortgage meltdown that led to the epidemic of foreclosures and the current economic recession. Now Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, is playing a similar role in the battle over health care reform. Although certainly more moderate than the right-wing Gramm, Baucus is nevertheless using his influence to undermine President Barack Obama's efforts to enact meaningful regulations that would require the insurance and drug companies to act more responsibly.

Just as Gramm argued that the banking industry could police itself without government rules and safeguards, Baucus is tying the hands of Congressional reformers who understand that we can't trust the insurance and drug companies to protect consumers and control costs. If Baucus is successful, health care costs will continue to skyrocket and hurt the nation's economic well-being, compounding the damage caused by Gramm's reckless role in stifling banking reform.

Read the article here.

Big Pharma, Insurance, Corporate Healthcare and Us!

Please read the following two interesting and very important articles on the status of healthcare in this country.

How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do...
By Robert Reich

I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits.

So they're pulling out all the stops -- pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Max Baucus, Chair of Senate Finance (now exactly why does the Senate Finance Committee have so much say over health care?) hasn't shown his cards but staffers tell me he's more than happy to sign on to any one of these.

Read more

Everyone hates corporate healthcare-- now, public demand could really change it...By Jim Hightower

Now is the time for boldness! Instead, we're getting Baucusness. Sen. Max Baucus, that is--Montana Democrat, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and frequent spear-carrier for the corporate agenda. He has now been tapped to handle Obama's promised rewrite of America's warped, ineffective, and exorbitantly expensive health-care system.

This should be a dream job for the Democratic leadership. Consumers despise today's corporatized medical structure. So do doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers. So do businesses that provide health-care coverage for their employees. The insurance-company-dominated system is so unpopular that swine flu enjoys a higher public-approval rating! A Pew Research Center poll taken in March 2009 shows that the American people don't merely want the current system fixed, they want it overhauled--76% say it must either be "fundamentally changed" or "completely rebuilt."

What an opportune moment this is for Obama to do something BIG for America--a rare, Rooseveltian moment in which the president and Congress have the chance (and duty) to rise above business as usual, to respond for once to the people's interest, to create a universal public service that would actually move our society a couple of strides closer to America's egalitarian ideals of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all.

Luckily, the "something big" is readily at hand. It's called a "single-payer" health-care system--a structural reform that has been successfully implemented in several countries, as well as in our own Medicare and veterans health programs. By expanding this system nationally, every person in our land would be assured good-quality care. No longer would profiteering insurance corporations control entry, dictating which doctors we can use (and what treatments they can provide), gouging us with ever-rising premiums and co-pays, and ripping off a third of our nation's health-care dollars for things that have nothing to do with either health or care--including ridiculous CEO pay packages, excess profits, massive billing bureaucracies, useless advertising hustles, posh headquarters, lobbying expenses, etc.

With the single-payer plan, we'd regain the right to go to the doctors and hospitals of our choosing, and doctors would regain authority over patient care. As the plan's name suggests, the difference is not in who delivers the care, but in how our health-care professionals get paid. Rather than the wasteful, autocratic middleman structure that now separates us patients from our providers (generating paperwork costs of some $350 billion a year), a no-frills, government-administered public fund would pay everyone's health-care bills directly--eliminating the interferences and overcharges of arrogant and avaricious insurance behemoths. Full coverage for all, less cost. Makes sense.

So, just prior to last month's opening Senate hearing, which was billed as a "round-table discussion" to air all viewpoints about how to reform the system, what was the one caveat laid down by Baucus? "Everything is on the table with the exception of single-payer," spake the chairman. "This country is not going to adopt single-payer, at least not at this time," he ruled with a royal wave of his hand.

Sheesh. Just when we need political boldness worthy of the ages, Baucus starts us off with his own Profile in Pusillanimity.

Then, on the first day of public testimony, the chairman backed up his weak-kneed approach to reform with, of all things, a show of force. As insurance giants and other representatives of corporatized health care were seated to testify, eight uninvited doctors, nurses, and other advocates of single-payer arose from the audience to protest their exclusion from the forum. "We want a seat at the table," shouted one protester. Rather than engaging these banned citizens on the merits, Baucus retorted, "We want police," summoning the capitol cops to arrest those who had so rudely interrupted his show. With the threat of unscripted democratic dialogue safely restrained, Chairman Baucus then turned to those who remained and said, "I want you to know I care deeply about your views."

Read more

So it is up you to let your Representatives know what to do. As Robert Reich suggests, "Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers -- one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies, and pushes insurers to do what they've promised to do."