Raining custard pies...

Report: Senator Max Baucus Received More Campaign Money from Health and Insurance Industry Interests than Any Other Member of Congress.

I mean really...
How much of this Gang of Six shit can you take?

Can't the Senate just cut the Finance Committee out and use the bill that the HELP Committee prepared?

Well, obviously between April and August, Sen. Baucus met individually with every member of his state for forty seconds each to discuss health insurance reform and all of them oppose it.

Steve, how can we expect Baucus to get anything done if you're going to go around reading stuff he said in April that completely contradicts what he believes now? See how this is all your fault?

Unf'nbelieveable. When R's say something, does anybody take 'em serious anymore.

And wasn't the eventual excuse for the Iraq war (when everything else that was thrown up and shown not plausable) ...so we can give 'em democracy.

Kevin - Baucus is a D.

which has placed Republican support for reform above all else.

In reality, place insurance company and BigPharma support for the bill above all else..."

One could write Sen Baucus a letter or email.

You could let him know he is not acting on the plans most favored by the majority of Americans and there is a chance that he and other blue dog Democrats will be targeted by out of state money come election time. The paltry millions he has taken from the insurance industry could be overwhelmed by angry American donations and phone calls to his constituents.

Then again, if he supports a strong public health bill, he could count on serious help in the next election cycle.

Let him know what you think.

The real question is, did he mean it in April and change his mind, or has he been pretending all along? Right now his committee is on schedule for delivering a bill sometime during MELIA Obama's first term, so I think we just need to follow the excellent advice of April Baucus, act quickly, and forget the Finance Committee.

A commenter on a talk radio show from Baucus' district said that Baucus engaged her and the dem party in his district on a conference call in which he now says he "supports" a public option after hearing the demands from his constituents. He now states he is for a public option...so which one is it. If he supports a public option then the committee bill is done since no republicans will vote for it so bipartisan efforts are done. So when do we get the bill now???

Can you find out Steve? Does Baucus now support a public option and if so, when can we expect a bill out of his committee?****************

bjobotts --
FDL posted about the conference call you reference (http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7485), and I too would like to learn more about the apparent contradiction. Maybe he's such close chums with Grassley because they're cut from the same cloth.

Maybe someone, anyone, should force Baucus and Conrad to wear clown outfits that are festooned with "I work for Aetna, Group Health, Blue Cross, etc" buttons all over them while blowing party horns as they walked bent over, pants down ...... well you get the point .......

Steve, haven't you ever made a rash promise drunk one night, then woke up hungover the next morning finding out people expected you to keep it.
Alcohol aside, that's Baucus' position. He never dreamed people would expect his bullshit to have meaning just because he's a U.S. Senator.
On the most cynical estimation possible, he's right. Better to bet you can fool the voters in the future than irritate your corporate sponsors today.
You can't even call people like this whores. Whores only lie to their tricks, not innocent bystanders.

Kevin - Baucus is a D. -Old School

In theory.

Kevin - Baucus is a D. -Old School
In theory. - doubtful

Thanks for pointing that out...I get carried away (and many others are so much more articulate than I).
I'm still of the mind when it comes to big reform items, they are all in the tank...this is the way it has been done forever and it is very hard to grow a spine and do the right thing. Could be they have to do a very delicate dance to get a reasonably bill passed while not biting the corporate sponsors. Could be another 100 years before insurance is a thing of the past and health care stands on its own merits.

What is society for, if not healthcare? - cld on previous thread

EXACTLY!

You ask, "Can we trade the August Baucus for the April Baucus?"

Sure. This is what JFK did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember that there were two letters from Khrushchev, one conciliatory and the other (the second one) belligerent. What to do? I believe it was RFK who figured out, just ignore the second and respond to the first.

So do the same thing here. Everybody on the left just needs to assume that Baucus in the end will be Baucus of April. Get the April Baucus out into the open, make the record clear, and treat him as if this is where he will be in September and October.

By the way, I know no one on the left wants to hear this, but the Baucus negotiations have been very useful. They have allowed the Repubs to dig themselves into an ever deeper hole of mendacity, hypocrisy, idiocy, and (to use Joe Klein's great word) nihilism. Obama's willingness to reach out to Repubs will pay dividends with moderates and independents down the road. Remember, he was opposed by what, 46 or 47 percent of the voters. Most of these were always unreachable. I realize almost everyone in the "progressive" community is weeping and wailing and declaring defeat (check out Salon today for a real obituary article by Thomas Schaller). In the real world, hello, it's August! Neither the House nor the Senate is in session. Neither has voted on anything. There's a lot of idiocy on the left right now.

By the way, just received what looks like a great new book (at least based on first few pages): "The Healing of America" by T. R. Reid. Like Krugman, Reid points out that there are three ways of getting to universal health care in the world today: the British system (he calls it the Beveridge model), the Canadian system (the National Health Insurance model), and the German/Swiss system (the Bismarck model). As both Krugman and Reid note, we have experience with all three: the VA is the British system, Medicare is the Canadian system, and most working people have a version of the German/Swiss system (with a couple of major differences to be noted below).

My question now: how did the far left get so hung up on the "public option"? As Krugman noted (while almost dismissing it) and Reid emphasizes, the German/Swiss model is a private sector approach. As Reid puts it, "both health care providers and payers are private entities." Here's the big point, however: they're non-profit and they are tightly regulated. Reid, silly man, assumes that this is more familiar to most Americans and thus most likely to be chosen. Wonder why no one on the left even sees it as an option? We should give the insurance companies a choice: accept a "public option" (and tell us how much you love it) or get turned into tightly regulated non-profits.

On Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell suggests that the Finance Committee negotiations are a kind of tap dance, because the Democrats haven't been able to put together 50 votes, let alone 60. If they'd had 50 they'd have finished this in July. Instead, they dance.

If Kennedy went into remission and showed up in DC, the Republicans would be deprived of an excuse for doing nothing. They would then tell us that it is Bobby Byrd who is critical, the one who could "bridge the gap".