From today's LA Times:
Reporting from Waukon, Iowa -- One is a thrifty soybean farmer from Iowa with a penchant for righteous speeches about government waste. The other is a Stanford-educated lawyer from a Montana ranching family who looks uncomfortable leading a debate.
Despite more than 60 years in Congress between them, Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, are outsiders -- loners whose independent streaks make colleagues wary, sometimes even mistrustful.
But unlikely as it may seem, the partnership between these two slightly eccentric men may hold the key to overhauling the nation's sprawling healthcare system -- a legislative grail that has eluded the giants of the Senate for more than half a century.
In the face of strident criticism from colleagues in both parties, Baucus (chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) and Grassley (the panel's senior Republican) are laboring to fashion a series of compromises on healthcare that might win the support of a bipartisan majority on Capitol Hill.
(A) There will be no bipartisanship on health care reform, because the Republican party's goal is to sabotage any and all reform. I'm am completely flabbergasted by Baucus' continued attempts to rope Grassley into the process. It...will...not...happen.
(B) The report kept mentioning the "middle ground" in health care. Let's be frank. A fully accessible and robust public option for health insurance is the "middle ground" - among the American people. The "middle ground" batted so casually around here is the ground between right-wing Republicans and pro-corporate Democrats.
When this happens -
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.
- you know you're really banging your head against a brick wall. I mean, it's not as if Harry Reid has been aggressively progressive on this issue...or any other issue for that matter.
A lot of folks who dislike Max Baucus' stance on health care often cite the amount of money our Senator receives from health care industries. I don't think it's the money. I think Baucus was being honest during his interview with John Adams when he said, "Money means nothing to me. I pay no attention to campaign contributions. Nothing. Makes no difference." I think it's who he talks to.
From the Sunlight Foundation:
Lobbying disclosure filings for the first quarter of 2009 reveal that five of Baucus' former staffers currently work for a total of twenty-seven different organizations that are either in the health care or insurance sector or have a noted interest in the outcome. The organizations represented include some of the top lobbying organizations in the health sector: Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Researchers of America (PhRMA), America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Amgen, and GE Health Care.
The former staffers turned lobbyists include two former chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti and Jeff Forbes, and one former legislative assistant, Scott Olsen. Other former staffers working with health care portfolios include Angela Hoffman and Roger Blauwet.
The murky world of Washington is filled with enemies and lunatics, and I suspect those our lawmakers trust most are those people who have worked with them down in the trenches of political warfare, during their toughest times. The staffers. And these people are very bright, and they know a lot about issues, probably more than Baucus himself does. So when they come a-knockin', Baucus listens.
And I suspect that's why the "middle ground" is staked out on some barren turf, far, far from where everyday Americans stand on the issue.
Ironically, one of the reasons politicians like Baucus listen to these lobbyists and pursue the "middle ground" is that they're constantly running scared, looking over their shoulders at critics and always anticipating the next election. In Baucus' case - who's been in office since the 1970s and survived the long, long Republican infestation of Montana - that's doubly so. Staking out the "middle," thwarting progressives and appeasing business has been a staple in the Senator's electioneering playbook. And to be fair to his political strategists, it's been a winning formula.
But now there's health care. And Baucus is suddenly a prominent national figure for reform. He's getting a lot of attention, and he's setting himself up to be the one held responsible for whatever comes out of reform. He has a couple of options, as I see it, before him:
- He can fight for the kind of reform most Americans want. That is a public/private model of insurance with a robust public option available to all. Call this, "giving us what we want."
- He can compromise with private insurers, and create a system that accounts for the uninsured, has some minor progressive reforms that dull the edge of the current system, and implement policies to reduce, or slow, health care costs, and ensure that Americans don't feel much bite in the form of higher taxes. Call this, "fixing leaks without pain."
Based on this Ezra Klein post, and what I know about Baucus' plan, I'm guessing he's trying for the latter. No surprise: it's cautious and "moderate."
But the thing is, we're in a crisis. People are miserable. They hate the way they pay for health care. If most people are untouched by reform, reform will be seen as a bust. If you're cautious and "moderate" on this issue, you will be seen as a failure.
This is one of the rare political issues where you can't win by not losing. |
