Last night I watched some of the markup in Finance. There was a question from Senator Ensign about the mandates - the requirement that every American must pay private companies a scheduled user fee for which there would be no reciprocal service, it was just membership in the club. He asked if the bill could eliminate the severity of punishment for non-compliance.
I had a similar experience in Knoxville, Tennessee in the early nineties.
The Commissioners of Knox County were successfully wooed by Browning Ferris Inc (BFI), to allow a garbage incinerator to be built in the Tennessee Valley. Locals had resisted it at least enough to have it removed from downtown Knoxville. When I joined Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC) the site was in a low income section of the county.
BFI: Their green sense was nada; no real recycling program, they weren't up to speed on emissions. All that was ahead of us. And they had the county commissioners in their pocket.
But what happened was an action eerily similar to this health care fight. BFI wanted to see a committed subscription to their plan, and so the commissioners came up with a user fee, covering BFIs guaranteed profit.
A separate authority was invented to set prices and collect fees.
We began a petition campaign protesting this "garbage tax". Mostly in front of supermarkets. One of the mayor's staff found me one afternoon and asked me how the petition campaign was going. I didn't have to lie, much; we would have reached the qualifying numbers in a week or so.
In a dramatic meeting at the county courthouse, the mayor pulled the city out of the plan, and the suits ran for the phones- it was 1991 - to tell Wall Street that it was over.
So then when I heard Senator Ensign bringing up questions about the implied resistance to the mandate, it was deja vu.
What nailed it home for me was to see Baucus squirming at the thought of not having police enforcement of the mandate. It seemed he covered his anxiety by congratulating Ensign for bringing up this important point blah blah, and said maybe we can defer it for a year or two, you know, to get people to sign on and then jail them later when through hardship or principle they blow off their health care payments.
Government shouldn't force all its citizens to purchase products from private companies when a proven and successful model of care is already available.