Today's big news about healthcare reform: Olympia Snowe removes her support for Baucus' bill citing cost.
Frankly, she's not the only one. Chuck Grassley says he can't support Baucus' bill because he's worried about illegal immigrants and abortion. (And just when did Grassley take the crazy turn?) Mike Enzi doesn't think states should pick up any of the tab for Medicaid expansion, and doesn't like fees imposed on insurance companies to help defray the cost of reform. (Of course, Enzi's admitted his job is to block reform.) Ron Wyden thinks the subsidies are too low. John Kerry: "It's not going to be the bill we're going to vote on."
More importantly for the bill's future in the Senate Finance Committee, Jay Rockefeller despises the bill and claims "four to six Democrats" in the committee feel the same way. If true, Baucus will need to find four to six committee Republican votes to pass his legislation out of committee.
But let's be clear -- some of this is Baucus's chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus's reform plans -- not "leaks", not trial balloons -- points toward a defective process.
And that may suit Democrats just fine.
Without any Republican support, any health care bill that passes Congress now has a real chance of including effective and progressive reform. It'll be tricky dancing around a Senate filibuster, but it likely be easier than getting something out of the Senate Finance Committee with Republican support.
