Looks like this was just put out tonight to try to get in front of the Friday News Dump:
Senator Max Baucus, (D, MT) is claiming that not only will all the Senate Democrats vote for the upcoming health insurance bill, but at least one Republican will too.
It was not known at the time of his statement what sort of medications Senator Baucus was under the influence of, over the counter or prescription. (Okay, that last sentence was snark, but don't we deserve snark after a day like this?)
Eager to reassure Republicans that he was only kidding, the Senate Majority Leader wasted no time snatching victory from the jaws of repeat Thursday.
"...Unanswered is whether Reid will include provisions in the bill to allow the government to sell insurance in competition with private industry. That so-called public plan is supported by liberals, who spoke up in favor of it at a closed-door Senate Democratic caucus meeting Thursday.
But because of opposition from moderate Senate Democrats, any public plan Reid does include likely would be some type of compromise, such as leaving the decision on a public plan to states or offering public coverage only as a backstop in areas where one insurer has a lock on the market – the approach favored by Snowe.
Reid said, "We're going to work very hard ... to see what, if anything, we're going to do" on a government plan.
"I favor a public option. Everyone knows that," Reid added. "
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Harry. Harry. Harry. It's not a Public Option if the Public can't PURCHASE the damned thing.
There's more diss coming out on the insurance industry lobbyist we all love to hate, the ignoble Karen Ignagni of AHIP. Now Nancy Ann DeParle of the White House team on health care, in the latest issue of Time, is claiming that sweet little Karen fibbed to them on a conference call Oct 6, and said her peeps were not going to put out a response report on the Abauculypse Bill coming out of the Senate Finance Committee.
Whoops!
For example, both DeParle and the Senate aide claim Ignagni voiced serious concerns during the Oct. 6 call over a provision in the Senate Finance bill that would raise $600 million in new taxes on the salaries of high-paid insurance executives. DeParle also said that in a White House meeting the next day, Ignagni repeatedly suggested that she was getting pressure from insurance CEOs who were alarmed about a drop in their firms' stock prices since mid-September, in part resulting from grim forecasts by Wall Street analysts. "She said her CEOs were really up in arms," DeParle said. For her part, Ignagni denies that she ever told the White House not to expect a report, and says she never discussed taxes on CEO pay with any officials. She said DeParle raised the issue of Wall Street analysts. "I had two people that were with me," Ignagni added as corroboration. "They don't lie."
http://www.time.com/...
I'm shocked, simply shocked, I tell you, that Karen Ignagni has a different version of that conversation.
It turns out PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm which was asked to make the report, after a few days of blowback, has a sort of different version of their analysis of the bill's effect, too.... oh noes!
“The reform packages under consideration have other provisions that we have not included in this analysis. We have not estimated the impact of the new subsidies on the net insurance cost to households. Also, if other provisions in health care reform are successful in lowering costs over the long term, those improvements would offset some of the impacts we have estimated.”
http://www.politico.com/...
Here's the pdf from sweet little Karen & AHIP, that has her special version of "workable bipartisanship reform"
http://www.tnr.com/...
As you know, as part of a plan to achieve universal coverage, AHIP’s Board has committed to a
complete overhaul of insurance market rules and new consumer protections to make pre-existing
conditions a thing of the past and end rating based on health status or gender. The Board has
proposed a massive administrative simplification initiative to slash paperwork, reduce medical
errors, and enable providers to focus on patient care—an initiative that is included in the current
legislation. We have also committed to funding a reinsurance mechanism to keep coverage
affordable during the transition to new market rules, although the current legislation would make
it impossible for this mechanism to offset the cost increases attributable to other provisions.
In our discussions with policymakers, we are recommending a series of solutions to create a
more affordable and sustainable health care system, including:
• Putting the nation on a path to universal coverage, and ensuring that the linkage to
universal coverage and market reform is restored;
• Taking a system-wide approach to bending the cost curve, instead of focusing on a subset
of Medicare providers;
• Instituting evidence-based medical care and best practices nationwide;
• Reorienting the entire health care system to focus on prevention, wellness, and
management of chronic conditions;
• Transforming health care administration;
• Enacting a 5:1 rating band to avoid rate shock for younger workers, and providing
targeted financial assistance to older workers; and
• Enacting medial liability reform.
You know, that is one magnificent set of sentences that don't say diddly squat about any of the actual details of who pays for what and how we get people who can't afford this crap now to be able to afford it. It sounds like a damned HMO advertisement. I get to say that because I was drilled real hard in the use and practice of the English language, and I'm translating this for those of you who didn't- I knew this was going to come in handy, some day.
Because this just isn't a problem of having pre existing conditions, recissions where the insurance companies dump your a$$ after you make a claim, or being female.
The fracking point of it all is that the private, for profit health insurance system is run as a BUSINESS monopoly, and that business model deliberately creates shortages to cause higher demand and prices for the product. Businesses have an obligation to the stockholders to do whatever they have to to make a profit.
Just because you have "coverage," does not mean you have access to medical care. Once again, a shocking 25% of all medical claims are denied even if you have medical insurance coverage. Between 50 and 70 million people go without insurance at least part of the time during each year, and millions more are under insured with junk that won't pay out.
The insurance executives and lobbyists at AHIP know this- that the private insurers must oversell coverage and deny access with their business models to make a profit, and they have no intention whatsoever of changing this. They refuse to address the fact that obviously, doctors are using the system in a way to try to extract blood out of a turnip by any means possible to get paid for doing something.
They will, however, be forced by competition with something guaranteed to be better, to let consumers actually use the product they thought they had purchased.
HARRY REID- DO YOU HEAR ME? ARE YOU WITH US ON THIS, OR NOT?
The question is, do we have any sort of representational government left willing to enforce regulations against theft.
Senator Max Baucus, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee which just voted out its version of the reform bill without even a Public Option, sounds confident and chipper that not only will all the Senate Democrats vote for it, but several "others"- we could assume at least one of these is Sen. Snowe of Maine, a proponent of foisting reform and a Public Option sometime off into the indefinite future.
Just what IS going to be in this bill ?