Here is a useful, politically charged question:
We have "Blue Dogs", We have "Yellow Dogs" and then we have a Max Baucus and Evan Bayh.
Baucus though is the special DINO, or more accurately the face of the bloodsuckers representation team in Washington D.C.
"What is the difference between Baucus and Cheney(Dick)?"
Dick Cheney has admitted top waterboarding only 3, torturing only 3 detainees although the evidence is he inspired perhaps hundreds more to
get similar or worse treatment.
Baucus has successful prolonged the suffering of, and intends to ramp up the cost in blood and treasure of a failed medical care system (Not a disease treating system-it does well at that problem in part).
Cheney has done in a handful, Baucus has and intends to keep murdering by spreadsheet millions of Americans.
The bastard actually has and continues to outdo Cheney!
your comments invited: Pete
Update May 24 :
I tried to get an analogy that would describe what a rightwing Democrat dedicated to keeping the status quo in health care would do.
If you remember the debacle of the Clinton impeachment circus, there were physician/legislators against him like Bill Frist who haden't even bothered to vote until he was in his 30's and got into politics to defend his family corporate for profit model of health care business. Their 800 clinics, nursing homes, laboratories and for profit hospitals were under competitive threat from the Clinton model. His thoracic surgery business removing diseased lungs from coal miners was under threat by smoking cessation efforts( and stricter OSHA) which he, as a "conservative Republican"vigorously fought. Self interest. His money growth at the expense of our cancer growth.
Once again, the same fight at a more intense level. Right now.
Only instead of Frist and the Repubs it is mainly DINO dems doing it.
The ironic thing is under present reimbursement rates, surgeons only get about 27% of their billings paid, among the worst financial performers of all. They would be better off with a more realistic payment schedule that actually would deliver on those rates.
Such as an honest single payer!
If you listen to the apologists for the present mess, the claim is this
horror, this gamble that your illness will be treatable in the time frame limiting it of your insurance, is the best disease treatment system (of the most prominent five or so diseases in America) of any in the world.
Thats what they are about...fighting and cashing
out of a fight against a particular disease with no real or sustained effort to diminish its incidence here in the USA .
What is missing is the acknowledgement that America simply gets more cancers and heart disease by far than any other country. The efforts and prices and effort to remediate it is obscenely expensive and unaffordable for the majority of our citizens.
Finally, the health care industry profits from more illness and more severe illnesses which take expensive fixes that generate their profits.
The incentives are deliberately stacked in favor of monopoly in drugs, and the most intense expensive treatment being preferred and designed into the treatment paradigm. The more expensive the treatment, the more money the insurers make.
head on collision here: Simply by spending on the proper tools and methods the needs for the expensive paradigm would lessen. The medical care system is in a parasitic, incestuous relationship with the afflicted. Instead of 80% of dollars spent on the last few years of life, it must be front-ended and intelligently applied resources and prevention done. Keep people healthy as the focus from the start, not heroism in huge spectacular scenarios in an ultimately futile end of life scenario that we have now.
Baucus wants those corporate vultures, business and medical professions both, gaming and profiting from the misery to make more and keep more. That is all he wants. The rest is sophistry and empty rhetoric. "Public option is not viable"according to him because those whispering in his ear are telling him the corrupt dollars will dry up as the worst of the private insurers will go away, outperformed by a pubic option plan that reinvests any excess money into better service and more comprehensive care.
He is their own pet little Dutch Boy holding back the leaks in the status quo health system dike as millions hurting pour into demands for change. His fingertips are coated with insurer's gold as if that will magically hold the flood back indefinitely.
Even if Max Baucus loses there is a reward from him from his backers and handlers. Remember Bob Livingston? From $100K a year congressman to 1 million dollar a year rep for Pharma, the drug lobby. No doubt MB has a similar gig golden parachute lined up.
Political exposure and castration. It is the least we can do. Less than 60% of employers now have any sort of health plan. It becomes more and more unaffordable- in fact it is accelerating its downward death spiral to full collapse.