Montanans Helped by Health Insurance Reform

by: Matt Singer

Thu Apr 08, 2010 at 13:11:50 PM MST

I've heard other stories, mostly about young adults eligible to get on to their parents insurance again, sometimes at a very crucial period of their lives.

I find these stories shocking, though, since my understanding was that only BCBS's CEO would benefit under this bill. Maybe I've been misinformed.

Libby and Equal Playing Field: This is Controversial?!?!?!?

by: Matt Singer

Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 13:17:39 PM MST

Michael Jamison writes:

If the nation's new health care bill has a hometown, it must be Libby, Mont., and if it has a face, it must be the face of Red Busby.

[...]

He's on a fixed income now, unable to work, and after basic expenses lives on less than $200 per month. Much of Busby's health care is paid for by W.R. Grace and Co. - the mining outfit that left this town riddled with asbestos - "but I have fears that they will discontinue my coverage when they have gotten out of bankruptcy."

Meanwhile, Senator Baucus is under fire for talking about the bill as a way of correcting an upward redistribution of wealth, which is basically true. Prior to the bill, there were 3 major sets of subsidies for health insurance in this country:

• The public systems like the Medicare, VA, and IHS that target certain segments of the population.
• Subsidized coverage or full coverage for certain classes of low-income people -- SCHIP, Medicaid, etc.
• The employer tax exclusion that really applies to the middle-class and up.

Health Reform Will Be a Political Winner for Democrats

by: Matt Singer

Tue Mar 23, 2010 at 12:25:57 PM MST

But there's something else interesting about all of this, which is that the issue that Republicans were planning on turning into Obama's Waterloo is in the process of kicking them in the ass. Polls numbers are already quickly moving in favor of the bill and its champions. Here's why:

• An Actual Landmark Achievement. In the words of Joe Biden, this is a big fucking deal. Literally. And no matter how painful the compromises are, this is a boost for the progressive base that feels it has waited a year to see the fruits of victory here they are.
• The Right Can't Get More Mobilized. And, at some point, I think the crazy train has to lose a little bit of steam. That much anger has to result in heart attacks or something, right?
• Moderates May Still be Uneasy with Dems, but They Don't Want a Tea Party Majority. The behavior of Republicans in the past week and its on-going operations of running on repeal of the bill, suing to stop its implementation, etc., doesn't look good. No one wants a bunch of children running the Congress.

Cost Controls in the Health Care Bill

by: Matt Singer

Mon Mar 22, 2010 at 09:35:35 AM MST

There's a bunch of other stuff, though, and Ezra walks through the five most proimising. These changes include Medicare programs to reform payment systems away from fee-for-service. If it works, private insurance will be under fairly significant pressure to follow suit, in large part because the transparency under the exchanges will strengthen competition while the regulations will protect consumers from fake insurance.

The only public option that ever scored significant savings was the one tied to Medicare. That one died way back before the full House moved to a vote. It's still a good idea, but it is only one of many.

And the bottom-line is that the bulk of the other ideas to contain costs are in this bill. Comparative effectiveness, MedPAC, capping the subsidies for the employer-based system, payment reform, etc. There's a whole lot of folks who disagree that these will lower costs in the long-term, but they're every bit as proven and sound of ideas as the public option when it comes to long-term cost containment.

Jay and others are probably offended that I'm referring to their criticisms on this front and disregarding research and science. Fine. I'm gonna call that one like I see it. The President didn't fight the House on the excise tax and payment reform because the issues were political winners in the short term. He did it because they're among the most likely ways to actually contain costs in this country.

Health Reform on Track for Passage

by: Matt Singer

Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 10:39:00 AM MST

From everything I can tell, the pieces are set and a vote in the next 4-5 days on comprehensive federal health reform is likely to be successful. Ezra has a good run down of the particulars of the bill:

Legislation that covers 32 million people. A world in which 95 percent of all non-elderly, legal residents have health-care coverage. An end to insurers rescinding coverage for the sick, or discriminating based on preexisting conditions, or spending 30 cents of each premium dollar on things that aren't medical care. Exchanges where insurers who want to jack up premiums will have to publicly explain their reason, where regulators will be able to toss them out based on bad behavior, and where consumers will be able to publicly rate them. Hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help lower-income Americans afford health-care insurance. The final closure of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit's "doughnut hole."

But you also get the single most ambitious effort the government has ever made to control costs in the health-care sector. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill cuts deficits by $130 billion in the first 10 years, and up to $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years.

There are some people out there pretty furious about this legislation. I hear talk that it doesn't really control costs (still haven't figured out how comparative effectiveness research and bundling aren't important parts of controlling costs) or that it forces people to buy terrible insurance (the same terrible insurance that it monumentally improves and that so many of us currently fight like hell to hold on to despite rate hikes).

Anyways, I've been working off-and-on on federal health care reform since late '06. This just feels damn good. One more vote to go in the House. One more in the Senate. A signature from the President.

That's how history is made.

Health Reform Enters Final Stretch, Good Impacts for Montana

by: Matt Singer

Mon Mar 15, 2010 at 09:43:35 AM MST

Health care reform is entering the final stretch in Congress. All sorts of stories will be written in the next few days, but the bottom line is that the Congress is about to pass the most significant economic justice legislation in 40 years and the most fundamental rewrite of our social contract since the New Deal and Social Security.

Like Social Security, Medicare, and, well, everything, this bill is a process, not an end-point. But the expansions of Medicaid, the creation of health insurance exchanges paired with meaningful regulation to make insurance function more like a regulated utility than the ferocious beast it has become, and the subsidies to make insurance affordable are all huge immediate gains for low- and middle-income Americans.

Combine all of those moves with the strong attempts to control costs -- bundling of prices, comparative effectiveness research, etc. -- and we've got something that just may keep people insured for the long term while also being the single biggest piece of deficit reduction legislation passed in the history of this country.

Damn. I know there are a lot of complaints out there, but we stand at a major turning point of American history. The future will build upon this point in a few ways:

• Creation of a public option. Count me skeptical that we'll get it in this bill. But the public option is an easier thing to pass in the future than the framework in which it would live and, over the long-term, it is important, but nearly as important as the insurance market regulations and subsidies that will make insurance fair and affordable. We can get back to this and probably in better form than the compromised version we'd get today.
• State experimentation. One of the amendments that both Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders helped insert allows states to take the revenue streams under the bill and implement alternate models of reform, so, yes, California, New York, or even Montana could pass, for example, a single-payer plan and use the federal funds to make it happen.
• Implementation of further cost control. This last piece will be the hardest, but it may prove the best. Focusing especially on bundling and comparative effectiveness research, which both create the opportunity to cut costs while increasing quality, we may be able to significantly restrain health care spending while improving health outcomes.

Schweitzer's Drug Play

by: Montana Cowgirl

Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 03:20:06 AM MST

Two questions arise. First, why had the issue gone dormant? Short Answer: The Obama Administration cut a deal with the Pharmaceutical Industry, early in the healthcare reform game, in which Obama pledged to kill any efforts to reimport drugs from Canada in return for the Drug Industry running TV Ads and other media--$80 million worth--in support of Obama's healthcare plan.

That's a shady deal by any measurement, unless the ultimate Obama plan finds some way to drastically reduce or subsidize prescription prices. Thus far the plan does not appear to do so.

But more troubling, and way under the radar, is the fact that our senators have taken the bait. Both Tester and Baucus recently (and quietly) voted against a Senate Bill that would have authorized the reimportation of prescription drugs (made by American companies) from Canada.    

Beyond that, there lurks the more dark and deplorable history of Baucus giving the pharmaceutical industry one of the greatest government corporate giveaways in history.  Those were the days when Baucus was hugging George Bush as a way to get re-elected (how times have changed).  And the most insidious part of that 2002 vote by Baucus, of course, was that Baucus's Chief of Staff left Baucus's office shortly thereafter, to cash in in a new job lobbying the Senate on behalf of the drug industry, employment which quickly made him a millionaire.

The second question is what the White House and/or Secretary Sebelius is going to tell Schweitzer. Has Schweitzer gotten too cute? Has he poked the tiger one time too many? Will Obama somehow retaliate or freeze-out our Governor? Or, has Schweitzer put them in an impossible position and thus revived a very important issue, and put it on course for some sort of resolution? Perhaps even a concession from the drug industry that is something more than a promise to run stupid and ineffective campaign ads for a stupid and ineffective corporate giveaway which the White House is trying to sell us?

This is a major poke in the eye of the Obama team and is sure to get some national attention (as Schweitzer always seems to do.)  But hey, the Obama Administration deserves it. 

Gloomy thoughts for a sunny day

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 13:48:02 PM MST

Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show.

I've been following politics for a long time, and this is the first time that I can remember where Democrats held a solid and unbreakable majority in both federal legislatures and held the White House. And I have to say, it's been d*mn demoralizing. Evidence A: banking regulation.

You'd think, after watching the financial sector torpedo the American economy, good, efficient, and workable banking regulation would be a priority. And there was hope, in Chris Dodd's consumer protection agency, which would have consolidated financial regulation into one body, and which would have refocused regulation on consumer protection, something has been missing in the crazed, corporate-fueled deregulation blitz of past decades.

You'd think corporate behavior in the financial sector after the bailout - the insolent, massive payouts to its executives, the orchestrated maneuvering to place blame for the crash on blacks and the poor, the exorbitant fees and interest rates imposed on its customers - that regulation would sail through Congress. But Dodd's agency has been effectively torpedoed, regulation watered down.

And now this. Corker's reflexive protection of the most rapacious lending industries in existence. Legal loan sharking targeting those with the least financial savvy and least ability to recover from parasitic interest rates.

And in diluting or warping good legislation beyond recognition,  Corker is not alone. After all it was Max Baucus himself who was the first to grab a House jobs bill as it came into the Senate, steered it into his Tax and Finance Committee, and made it contingent on "reforming" the estate tax (and preserving the odious Patriot Act). That's right - a bill to help the unemployed find work must also help the children of the mega-wealthy keep their condos in Vail.

In short, it's been demoralizing seeing this Democratic supra-majority squandered in the back rooms, gutted by "compromises" that riddle bills with so many loopholes that they end up looking like the legislative version of swiss cheese.

Yes, I know, legislation is the result of years of work. Yes, I know I should be patient. Yes, sure, some banking regulation is better than no regulation (...or is it?). But I don't see any relief, any glimmer of values from Democratic legislators.

Or am I missing something?

Baucus continues to explore new territory on the corruption chart

by: Montana Cowgirl

Sat Feb 27, 2010 at 10:54:22 AM MST

"suspend ANY regulations for coal-fired utilities and other industrial facilities until Congress acts on climate and energy legislation." [emphasis added]

The idea that the EPA can't regulate coal is of course total crap. Baucus' support for the deregulation of coal power plants is shocking, but it shouldn't be a total surprise. It appears that he is beholden to industry, raking in over $1.8 million in campaign contributions from mining and resource extraction.

The contributions from these industries were likely the reason Baucus was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the Clean Power Act in 2005. The act had been vigorously opposed by the coal industry as well as the electric utilities industry because it would have regulated the emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, and most notably -- carbon dioxide.

You'd have to be a total idiot to want to return to the bad old days of unregulated extractive industry. Ask someone dying of mesothelioma if they think asbestos shouldn't be regulated.

Regulating CO2 emissions is not going to put anyone out of business; in fact, it will force all of these dinosaurs to start investing in new energy infrastructure. Only someone with a sub par understanding of the issue fears natural advancement and much-needed innovation.  

Kaiser to Depart Baucus Operation, Lewis Moving Up

by: Matt Singer

Fri Feb 19, 2010 at 14:57:21 PM MST

John Lewis is moving up from Deputy State Director to State Director. I'm not sure yet if other shuffling will occur.

Barrett and I have butted heads a few times over the years, but he's a sharp operator. It really is a loss for that office. Kaiser, for example, posted and engaged in conversation here (publicly, under his own name, not the most common thing) for quite some time before concluding that suffering the slings and arrows wasn't really helping him do his job.

Hilltop Strategies, the firm he's joining, is gaining a hell of a team member.  

Health Reform Still Alive

by: Matt Singer

Mon Feb 08, 2010 at 09:54:04 AM MST

The GOP's predictable response? "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA. I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" They're calling to start the whole process over. Whaaaaa.

If they want to take a pass on being able to provide input, let them pass. Hold the summit, ask for their ideas, let the President outmatch them once again, and pass the Senate bill and a corrective bill through both chambers, on party lines if need be.

You don't punt at second and goal.

Baucus accused of public drunkeness by conservative *ssholes

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Dec 28, 2009 at 10:31:13 AM MST

Assholes.

Anyone who's ever seen Max Baucus give a speech knows this is somewhat representative of the way he speaks in public. He's a crappy public speaker, okay? And that's when he's not upset or tired, as he obviously is while giving this "speech."

From the comments at the b'birds:

Anyone who actually knows Max understands that he has struggled for years with what many of us believe to be the remnants of a childhood speech impediment that he is too proud to admit that he suffered from and is, likewise (and rightly if it is true), too determined not to let stand in the way of a career in public service. I do not know this definitively to be true, but strongly believe that this is the case.

A Max speech will not be confused any time soon with an Obama speech, nor would anyone in Montana expect it to be. (Perhaps conservative bloggers elsewhere are confused). When Max is excited, as here, in public (and in private) sometimes he tends to slur his words. Again, nothing new for anyone who has seen Max excited or, as very likely in this case, utterly exhausted in the marathon of the health care debate. I have seen both excited and exhausted Max. I also would be absolutely stunned if Max went to the Senate floor intoxicated and see nothing here other than a tired and excited Max, struggling as he normally does to communicate what is in his head and heart.

I've seen Max speak dozens of times. I've been at informal events where there's plenty of alcohol. I've never seen the Senator publicly drunk, or even drinking alcohol. The dude runs marathons, people. He's a health nut, not a drunk.

I think it's fair game for folks to attack his politics, to go after his judgment in nominating US attorneys, to question his too-cozy relationships with lobbyists, but, of course, that kind of behavior is just fine with conservative bloggers, isn't it? After all, that's the kind of government they're fighting for.

So instead we get treated to sleazy made-up-sh*t.

The triumph of imagination over intelligence

by: Yellowstone Kelly

Sat Dec 26, 2009 at 11:01:05 AM MST

Until the story broke about Tiger's tendency to stray, none of us knew much about his private life. Beautiful wife. Check. Son. Check. Pancake house waitress. Whaaaat?

As with Tiger, until recently, we knew very little about Max Baucus' private affairs.

Since, 1974, Max's handlers have carefully developed and airbrushed a squeaky clean image. Yes, he and Ann divorced early on in his career. Weathered that one. Survived a sexual harassment allegation by a former chief of staff. As time has gone along, Max, to some extent like Bill Clinton, evidently has come to believe he could do what he damned well pleases.

Sleeping around on Wanda and having a girlfriend who, until 2009, served as his staff director (in more ways than one) while married and serving in the US Senate is bad enough. But, to nominate his bed partner to be US Attorney in February 2009?

Wait a minute.

Not only bad judgment. It represents arrogance of power at its worst.

Look. Anyone who has been to Washington, DC in recent years and who was invited to the Baucus residence for social functions had to have to concluded that Melodee Haines acted in the capacity as the lady of the house. (Wanda must have been out performing community service for the mulch melee at Johnson's Nursery.)  

No one said a word, at least publicly. Last year, there were whispers that something was going on. Do you really believe Max's staff was in the dark? And, that Jim Messina, of all people, didn't know?

It's not the affair, it's the coverup

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Dec 11, 2009 at 13:26:34 PM MST

For starters, in the post of links to the story, I missed editorials from three of Montana's biggest newspapers. The Billings Gazette is surprised at Baucus' judgment. "What was Max Baucus thinking? That his personal relationship with his state director, Melodee Hanes, wouldn't matter when he forwarded her name for consideration as Montana's US attorney?" (The Gazette also provided a handy timeline of the affair.)

The Missoulian excoriated Baucus for actively suppressing knowledge of his relationship with Hanes during the vetting process of his US attorney nominations:

Eight months ago, when Hanes' name surfaced as one of the nominees for the U.S. attorney's job, the Missoulian asked Sen. Max Baucus' spokesman whether Baucus was involved in a romantic relationship with Hanes - as her ex-husband was alleging - and if so, why Baucus would pursue a course that posed such a clear conflict of interest.

Not only would Baucus not speak directly to the Missoulian, but his then-spokesman, Barrett Kaiser, refused to address the issue and strove to keep any story at all about Hanes' nomination from print. Indeed, the night before the story was to run, Kaiser called the paper and told us that Hanes' nomination had been withdrawn.

With nothing from Baucus on the record, and no way to prove the veracity of Hanes' husband's assertions, the Missoulian couldn't responsibly print the allegations.

(Is it me? Or did they totally drop the ball on this story? What kind of reporter stops investigating a story when the investigated subject refuses to speak about it? They couldn't find anyone else to confirm Baucus' relationship to Hanes? Really?)

Taking One for the Boss

by: Matt Singer

Thu Dec 10, 2009 at 11:30:48 AM MST

1. I think it is messed up that a Senator's significant other, whether boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, partner, whatever, could be appointed a U.S. Attorney without violating ethics rules.
2. I think it is messed up that a Senator's former state director could be appointed...say...U.S. Marshall, as happened with Conrad Burns earlier this decade.
3. I think workplace relationships are generally terrible ideas.

If anything, I'd be more worried about the potential of a future scorned lover in the US Attorney's position than I would be about the fiercest political nemesis...

But there's a place here where the Missoulian crosses the line, attacking Max's staff for going to bat for their boss. Anyone who has worked in politics knows that going to bat for your boss is what you do. Staff aren't extensions of their "principal," they're an army dedicated to protecting that person.

I don't know who in Max's operation knew what when. I'm guessing the Missoulian also lacks omniscience. I do know that has probably been a damn long week for a bunch of people who didn't make ethical lapses.

I heard a story years ago about a local Democratic elected official who got asked what he thought about Bill Clinton's affairs. He said he was pissed. When he got told that he was being prude, he responded that he didn't really care that Bill Clinton had sex. He cared that Bill Clinton's actions had to become the focus of so many young staffers and other people all over the country who couldn't get laid for the next two years because of the long hours they had to put in protecting the President's agenda.

Anyways, as someone who works in the bidness, it is worth keeping in mind that as usual, the staff here aren't culpable. They're just responsible for taking care of the mess. Being jerks to them personally is unnecessary.

Update -- Matthew Koehler suggests in comments that I disclose that I'm friends with members of Max Baucus's staff. That's true. I've both butted heads with them and gone to their birthday parties.

For the record, I'm friends with lots of people, as evidenced by my Facebook page. But, yes, my friends include multiple people on Max Baucus's staff...and I care about my friends and the difficult time they're in.

A Baucus scandal?

by: Jay Stevens

Sat Dec 05, 2009 at 12:49:40 PM MST

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus' office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana.

Hanes withdrew her name from consideration to move to Washington DC.

Update: Emptywheel:

...while we're getting all scandalized about Baucus's bad judgment, let's talk about the bad judgment that did hurt taxpayers, rather than the one that almost did: the way in which the revolving door on his committee staff made it very easy for the insurance industry to write the Senate's health care reform bill. I'm much more offended-and directly affected-by the fact that former Wellpoint VP Liz Fowler wrote the Senate health care bill than I am that Baucus nominated, then withdrew, his mistress for a plum job.

Affordability in the Long Term; Why the Senate Bill is Good

by: Matt Singer

Sun Nov 22, 2009 at 14:38:10 PM MST

The Senate bill, by most accounts, is a more conservative bill. It is financed primarily not by an explicitly progressive tax, but by an excise tax on health plans that will hit Goldman Sachs executives for sure, but will also hit a lot of working class union members who have negotiated health benefits for years.

The subsidies for purchasing coverage in the Senate bill are lower than I would like, meaning near-term affordability isn't what I would hope (of course, it also means less of a public transfer to private insurance companies, which I suppose is OK).

With all that in mind, people have been asking me a lot lately why I'm still supportive of the bill. For me, it really cuts to a few things:

1. The underlying structure of the bill -- subsidies, insurance exchanges, insurance market regulations, etc. -- are the right underlying reforms to make a public/private system work. They also may take us a bit closer to single-payer and certainly do not move us further away (e.g. single-payer supporters may not get what they want in this bill, but it does not foreclose victory down the road, which is important).
2. There are some very smart political incentives built in. For example, members of Congress get thrown into the exchanges with a lot of the rest of us, helping guarantee that the incentive down the line is for them to maintain high quality and affordability (relatively speaking on the affordability, a lot of members of Congress happen to be very rich and all are higher income than the majority of Americans).
3. The biggest point of all is that the Senate bill is extremely serious about costs over the long-term. What should worry just about everyone in the healthcare debate is how completely unsustainable the current system is. It isn't just that it is expensive or that administrative costs run too high. Those administrative costs don't even begin to explain the wild inflation that occurs in America's healthcare sector. You simply cannot have costs in 17% of your economy rise at rates 5-10% faster than the economy as a whole in perpetuity.

   My friend Jay Stevens wrote a while ago that his problem with the excise tax was that it penalized spending on healthcare and that we should be happy to encourage people to spend more on healthcare. If healthcare actually improved health, I'd be inclined to agree that it is worth subsidizing. But the correlations are relatively weak (and the odds that hospitalization can hurt or kill you are unfortunately high). Under these circumstances, reducing healthcare spending and allowing ourselves to spend more money on other things (perhaps sporting equipment or healthy local food, both of which can be expensive but would do more in general to improve health than more heart surgeons) would be a good thing.

   Does the Senate bill do this? We don't know. But it does everything it can to "bend the curve." Is that good for progressives? Depends on what you mean by progressive, but anyone concerned that health insurance is too expensive for low-income people and tthe middle class should hope that the low- and middle-income people of 20 years in the future have better choices. That requires bending the curve. And by all accounts, the Senate bill works harder to bend the curve than the House bill.

Even better news: CBO has at times been known for being woefully pessimistic. They overestimated the cost and underestimated the impact of tradeable permits for reducing SO2 pollution (which helped clean the air in my (and Dennis Rehberg's) hometown of Billings -- maybe "cap and trade" ain't such a bad idea, Mr. Rehberg). They overestimated the cost of Medicare's prescription drug benefit. And they routinely admit that they can't "score" the cost of key provisions of health care bills that may further reduce spending because these are experiments and folks like CBO approach experiments conservatively.

A couple months ago, a "meme" flew around Facebook as millions of social networkers changed their status to read "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick." Both the Senate and the House legislation accomplish these goals. If we want to establish additional corollaries, such as "No insurance executive should make money" or "No brain surgeon should make more than $250,000 per year," we could have done that. But those goals aren't really as important, either policy-wise or politically.

Soon, we'll pass a bill that should effectively end medical bankruptcy in America and guarantee baseline health care access for all citizens (too low a bar, I agree, for a variety of reasons). Over the long-term, this bill will likely ensure that we need not ever turn back on that promise and that we may even expand on it, just as we did over time with the promises of the civil rights acts and Social Security.

For me, that's a victory.

The Wait After Reform

by: Matt Singer

Mon Nov 16, 2009 at 10:13:09 AM MST

For some folks, this is another major black eye for an already deeply flawed bill. For many of us, though, this is simply another foreseen frustration inevitable with major system changes in a huge sector of the economy.

The health care bill will have a handful of immediate changes. Although the structure of the national high-risk pool is currently unclear, it should provide some near-term help for the currently uninsurable. In the slightly longer term, the exchanges and the subsidies and insurance regulations should make coverage affordable for basically everybody and near-universal coverage will be the standard in the U.S. And we'll also put some key systems in place to actually bend the cost curve on health care -- which eventually will mean fewer procedures, devices, and drugs that aren't improving our health.

What marked me most about the Dennison piece wasn't the sadness of the young woman at the end when she hears that no help is coming for three or four years, it is that based on these five (representative?) stories, help is actually on the way. It's been a long time since anyone could say that on the health care front.

Baucus promises to be major obstacle in passing climate change legislation

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Nov 05, 2009 at 10:13:08 AM MST

Ah, so who's the sole Democrat that voted against the legislation?

Max Baucus.

Not that it's much of a surprise. Baucus raised "concerns" with the bill last month, saying the 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 was too lofty a goal. Baucus' statement -- "we cannot afford a first step that takes us further away from a conceivable consensus on climate change" - hints that he'll stall the bill in the Tax and Finance committee, likely convening a "green" "Gang of Six" to gut the bill, or kill it altogether.

Frankly, Baucus should listen to Lindsey Graham, Republican:

The green economy is coming. We can either follow or lead. And those countries who follow will pay a price. Those nations who lead in creating the new green economy for the world will make money.

Or retired admiral Dennis McGinn, who reminded Montana's delegation that climate change is a national security issue.

Or the 101 Montana businesses that urged the state's delegation to support "strong climate and energy legislation."

Sadly, Dennis McDonald demonstrates how you can join Baucus in opposing climate change legislation while simultaneously keeping your enviro "cred," from his Facebook page:

Cap and trade has proven to be complex, inefficient, and an obstacle to investment in alternative energy. I think a straightforward carbon emissions tax would be a lot simpler and a more effective way of getting people to invest in alternative energy.

There are bumps in the European cap-and-trade program, but remember, a cap-and-trade system was a key instrument in the enormous success in the reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions that caused acid rain in the 1990s. It works.

And the Waxman-Markey House cap-and-trade bill, with all of its faults, sets the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That's huge.

Here's a primer on what "cap and trade" is...and, of course, Grist is the place to go on climate and energy news - check out thoughts on carbon tax v cap and trade, thoughts on the House climate change bill, and an appraisal of the Kerry-Boxer bill. Oh yeah, and debunks the hysteria around financial institutions planning to "game" the cap-and-trade bill.

Closer Than We've Ever Been; So Far Left to Go

by: Matt Singer

Wed Oct 28, 2009 at 12:04:26 PM MST

But people have no doubt seen the commentary in the last 48 hours regarding the fact that we don't have 60 votes for cloture in the Senate yet. As I have been before, I'm fundamentally optimistic about this. I think the CBO scoring of the merged bill will come back favorable. I think scores on amendments to remove the public option will put the deficit burden on opponents of the public option. I think choice is fundamentally popular and that Republicans and the sell-out Democrats are facing an uphill battle against polling.

All that being said, the fact that we can't move to a consensus point yet on the public option means that progressives have less leverage on three other important points: financing mechanisms, subsidies for affordability, and the strength of the employer mandate. That may be the reason for the foot dragging. Who knows?

But a few other thoughts:

1. I don't know if Max Baucus has been trying to gut this bill like a fish or busting ass to strengthen it back to his white paper while making sure he has the votes to move forward. I do know that the general momentum in this fight right now is with reformers and specifically with public option advocates and that is both a result of progressive pressure, progressive insiders, and the slow and steady work of Max and his staff and others like him in Congress.
2. The last 48 hours should have proven that while the problem in DC is with 40 given bad votes that require a bill that "runs the table" with Dems and the two Independents, that still means that putting together a bill that can pass is a damn tough thing to do. Both the Senate and the House will be moving toward floor consideration of their respective bills soon. That is historic. It is amazing. But we don't have the votes for cloture yet.
3. The Senate is a uniquely messed up institution. If you've been in the weeds, you've read that Joe Lieberman has agreed to let the health care bill be considered...because the world's greatest deliberative body requires sixty votes for debatee to even begin if a single Senator objects. This same body requires 60 votes to end debate in such a manner that the most unpopular political party in the history of the country or something can literally find one grandstanding member of the majority and lock down the chamber. Why no one has launched a full-frontal assault on the chamber's structure and existence in American political life is, frankly, beyond me.