Baucus Regrets Not Including Single-Payer in the Health Care Mix
Regrets? He's got a few.
I think you rarely see a sitting Senator be as reflective about the legislative process as Max Baucus is here when he says he regrets that the idea of a single-payer health care system was left out of the mix:
He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.
I thin that’s right. Framing effects are important in politics. The public-private competition is supposed to be a compromise between the pristine vision of single-payer and the desire of private insurers not to be put out of business. It creates a situation in which insurers are challenged to prove that single-payer advocates are wrong, rather than simply assert it. But with no single-payer plan in the mix, this gets lost, and the compromise becomes the leftmost anchor of the debate. A single-payer plan couldn’t possibly have passed, but I think having hearings on single-payer and having one committee draft a serious single-payer bill that gets a serious CBO score would have been a useful exercise. In particular, it would have focused the mind on the costs involved in rejecting this option.
Meanwhile, it would be nice if David Herszenhorn, who wrote the article, understood the difference between a “single-payer plan” for health insurance and “a fully government-run health system.” The concepts are quite distinct and correspond to the difference between a health-insurance company and a hospital. Single-payer means the government is the insurance company, government-run health system means that the government would actually run the health system. Both exist abroad (Canada is single-payer, the UK is government-run) and at home (Medicare is single-payer, the VHA is government-run) and they’re very different.
47 Responses to “Baucus Regrets Not Including Single-Payer in the Health Care Mix”
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June 24th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
On the other hand, the single-payer advocates felt they were being sold out from day one by Baucus — including Ed Schultz, who’s from North Dakota — and they made sure that everyone heard about it. The result is that Max Boughtoff has less room to sell out further, and any compromise scenario receives massive pushback. Not that the GOP is prepared to compromise in any case, because it knows that a half-decent bill is politically damaging.
The fact that Herszenhorn doesn’t know the difference between govt-run and single-payer ought to be really embarrassing, but that would require a degree of shame.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I mention Schultz here, because his ND populist think, which might come across as hokey, is designed at least in part with the Dakotas and Montana in mind, and with Baucus, Conrad and Dorgan in particular.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
So put it on the table, Max!
June 24th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Why do you take him at his word? Saying he regrets it is just covering his ass. If he had to go back and do it again, would single payer be on the table? No, it wouldn’t. No chance.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Idiots idiots idiots. Oh well, we can always just go to the emergency room.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I can just picture poor Max Baucus trying to get single-payer on the table.
BAUCUS: I’d really like to get single payer on the table, but there’s no way I’ll go for it. Since there is little likelihood that I’ll let it on the table, there isn’t much sense in my trying to do so. Regretably, it just isn’t practical to expend my political capital on it since I’m not gonna give it a chance. Sorry, but my hands are tied, by me.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
What Bagman said!
It’s not like we actually have had a vote on something already.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Baucus is trying to find convenient excuses already but it won’t do. Public plan must be included, or the Democrats are useless. Get to work, Max.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Does anyone actually buy this? He’s trying to avoid taking the blame (he only wants the credit) from killing health care reform.
He is, in fact, very very happy he didn’t include single payer.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Puh-leeeeze. Baucus is either a liar or the stupidist man on Earth.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
What Bagman said!
It’s not like we actually have had a vote on something already.
I think Baucus accidently jumped the gun on this opinion. Or he’s conceding an error and for some reason I don’t believe him.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Baucus is a shill for his legions of for-profit health care donors. Who is he going to cut out of the debate, single payor proponents who don’t donate jack squat or Max’s campaign gravy train?
Dirty Max’s apology rings insincere.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
@Njorl FTW!
June 24th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
A recent poll has shown that 80% of people are happy with their health insurance. Another study shows that 44% of the uninsured have enough income to afford insurance if they elected to buy it. So why do President Obama and the Democrats want to nuke our current health care system in order to cover the insurance costs of a relatively small number of people? It just makes no sense what so ever.
President Obama is now calling on his supporters to come up with a lot of hard luck stories about their problems with the current health care system The problem is that government run health care may be even worse than the current system. Think about it, Medicare and Social Security are going broke and Medicaid is a big reason States like NY and CA are going broke. So why would anyone think that government won’t make an even bigger mess out of health care and put the Nation even deeper in debt?
The bottom line is that the only way government can cover an additional 47 million people while at the same time reducing health care costs is to ration health care. This translates into the government making life and death decisions on who get what health care if any based on political favoritism and one’s “worth” to the elite in power. Already the Democrats are giving the Unions a better deal on health care deductions than the average Joe.
Think about it. Do you really want to give up the insurance you are happy with and give the government absolute power over your life and death health care decisions ? I think President Obama and the Democrats know the majority of people would be against giving over that kind of power to the government and that is why they are trying to push health care through so fast before too many people catch on to what President Obama is up to.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Max Baucus is my cousin. That is all. Carry on.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
“Obama and the Democrats know the majority of people would be against giving over that kind of power to the government”
Except that polls consistently show majority support for single payer and 60% + support for a public option. Get a clue, then try again.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Hi mary!
Readers of Balloon Juice may recognize “mary’s” handiwork. It generally involves appearing out of nowhere and shitting out insurance industry talking points verbatim into various comment threads.
A more creative and crafty troll would try to gradually worm their way into the comment thread community and try to use their familiarity to advance their arguments. But stupid, artless “mary” just barges in and expects an intelligent and well-informed to lap up the cut-and-pasted bullshit. Weak sauce, beyotch.
Besides, Will Allen will advance your arguments for free and at least we know him.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Should be:
“But stupid, artless “mary” just barges in and expects an intelligent and well-informed commentariot to lap up the cut-and-pasted bullshit.”
June 24th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
The concession doesn’t mean much, but it’s nevertheless evidence that pressure has an effect. More hearing disruptions please!
June 24th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
What Kal said: More hearing disruptions, please.
I’m meditating a sort of “Make a Wish” concept — where people who are dying because they couldn’t afford to get diagnosed or couldn’t get care do their dying right on Capitol Hill. Might as well do something that matters with your last days instead of lying there hooked up to a machine, eh?
June 24th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Is Max Baucus trying to tell us that he has never haggled over the price of a car or negotiated a real estate contract?
June 24th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Kal, The New York Times poll you are talking about was heavily weighted in favor of Obama supporters so is invalid. Again, even President Obama is quoted as saying that 80% of people are happy with their private insurance plans and don’t want it replaced by a government run plan. Also, most people don’t want some faceless bureaucrat making life and death decisions on what if any health care you’ll get based on political favoritism and one’s “worth” to the elite in power. Think about it, the Democrats are already playing poltical favoritism with the unions by making their health benefits exempt from being taxed while saying anyone not in union benefits will be taxed. So even before the bill is passed poltical favoritism is raising it’t ugly head which is a preview of what is too come if President Obama gets his way.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Mary, you fool, when people say they are happy with their care, they mean THEIR CARE, their doctor, their coverage. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING THRILLED THAT THEY HAVE THEIR INSURANCE COMPANY. Get real. And some people like to use too much plastic and waste gas. Doesn’t make it right.
This is hilarious to watch because the truth is that EVERYTHING ELSE WILL FAIL that is NOT single payer or government run. Its like watching Obama chase his tail. Hee hee. All we have to do TO REBEL against this hoax is NOT PARTICIPATE. So then, besides a STIMULUS FAILURE, A BAILOUT FAILURE, AND A WAR POLICY FAILURE, OBAMA CAN ADD A HEALTH CARE FAILURE TO HIS PRESIDENCY.
Chump Change and Cinderella, the patient dumper, deserve it royally.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Why the either or?
June 24th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
most people don’t want some faceless bureaucrat making life and death decisions on what if any health care you’ll get based on political favoritism and one’s “worth” to the elite in power.
And yet they retain private insurance, where some faceless bureaucrat makes life or death decisions on what if any health care you’ll get based on political favoritism and one’s “worth” to the elite in power.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
“Another study shows that 44% of the uninsured have enough income to afford insurance if they elected to buy it. ”
Not adequate insurance. And they still get dropped when they get sick. The mendacity and disinformation on this issue is fucking stunning.
The bottom line: The richest country in the world should have good health coverage for all of its people, just as every other developed country does.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
[...] the girls are all pretty, too. Two thumbs up for that wonderful country. Really.) Anyway, Yglesias points to this choice quote from Max Baucus in the Times: [Baucus] conceded that it was a mistake [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
What comments #4 and #9 said. Baucus isn’t sorry at all. He could have included it from the start but chose not to. I read it in the article this morning and could tell immediately it was a disingenuous statement.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
I think the real question is: why is Senator Max Baucus so much worse at ordinary negotiation that random guys posting on the internet in their underwear? How did he get where he is without knowing how to make a deal?
June 24th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
[...] sign whatever crappy health bill Max Baucus leaves on his desk. Baucus, meanwhile, has apparently discovered all on his own that pushing the ‘compromise’ option to the leftmost edge of acceptable discourse makes [...]
June 25th, 2009 at 12:09 am
“He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a ’single-payer plan,’ not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.”
Well, duh, Senator.
(Sorry. He doesn’t deserve more civility than that.)
June 25th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Baucus doesn’t regret shit; he just wants us to think he does.
That’s because he wants to make people stop calling his office and saying, “Hey, dumbfuck, you’re the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and you expect us to believe you don’t have any influence, much less control, over what goes into the central piece of legislation you’ve been working on recently? Who does the work of the committee, the fucking underpants gnomes? I’d ask how stupid you think we are, but you don’t need to answer for us to know.”
(*I* think civility is highly overrated, or else Republicans wouldn’t be encouraging us to practice it so much and so often.)
On the other hand, it’s not clear how hard the Obama Administration is really fighting on this *either*.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:38 am
Re: So why do President Obama and the Democrats want to nuke our current health care system in order to cover the insurance costs of a relatively small number of people?
No one is “Nuking” the healthcare system. We are simply trying to build onto the existing system, and eliminate its abuses, some of which really are outrageous (read up on “recissions”.) If you are happy with your current coverage you will not be forced to change it by any dictat fron the government. Perhaps your employer will change it on you, but that’s already true– nothing locks in your current coverage; it exists only at your employer’s discretion. Under this reform if you lose your job or your employer decides to drop coverage altogether you won’t be left in the lurch.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:27 am
>>> Mary: “A recent poll has shown that 80% of people are happy with their health insurance.”
Those who have a job are happy with their “care,” but their care will not change under a single-payer system. But “insurance” will. We’ll take the 31% of insurance bureaucracy waste and apply it to health care instead.
Look, so much in life has been made obsolete because of better ways to do things. Overnight FedEx replaced by fax, fax replaced by email, TV antennas by cable and so on. It’s time for the insurance industry to leave health care. Granted it’s been one of their profit centers, but those profits are being drained from our already destroyed economy.
For the same dollars we are spending today we could provide first class Cheney-care to 100% of our people. Our problem is the insurance bribes to politicians, and that must change.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:10 am
“(*I* think civility is highly overrated, or else Republicans wouldn’t be encouraging us to practice it so much and so often.)”
Exactly!
“On the other hand, it’s not clear how hard the Obama Administration is really fighting on this *either*.”
I hope he’s thinking this: push health care reform now, knowing that you won’t get anything good, and then sign whatever they give you but declare, bluntly, that it’s not good enough and you’ll be back for more health care reform next year, when some 470 of these clowns are up for re-election. That’s my hope. Mr. Obama has the brains to create that scheme; I don’t know that he has the will to execute it.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Senator Baucus’ regrets are only that his suppressing single payer made Obama’s plan the furthest left, therefore much harder to push. It had nothing to do with second thoughts about single payer itself.
A note here – while advocating for single-payer, I talked to some people who said they were satisfied with their insurance (not many). When I asked them whether they have actually ever tried to use it, the answer was ,”No.”
June 25th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Herszenhorn’s ignorance is pretty typical for most Americans – they basically have no idea at all about how various universal health care plans work in different countries (hence the proliferation of terms like “European-style single-payer”, when the various European systems are all quite different from one another). Half the battle we single-payer advocates have to fight is ignorance.
But what kind of insurance? The issue of the Uninsured is largely a red herring to the main problem – health care costs destroy lives in this country due to the lack of a universal health care system. Witness this study, which found that out of all bankruptcies, 60% were primarily from medical costs, and the people in question were largely middle-class and 78% insured at the point when they got sick.
It’s nothing less than astonishing to me that this doesn’t get major coverage on the media networks – they’re too focused on their narrative of the Uninsured. The “under-insured” are suffering as well, and woe to the middle-class family that develops a major health problem.
Neither Social Security nor Medicare are “going broke” – it’s just that in the former’s case, we’ll actually have to -gulp- raise some taxes to cover it once the bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund run out in 2047. In the latter’s case, the “broke-ness” they’re complaining about is Medicare’s rise as a percentage of GDP.
Besides, Medicare’s rise isn’t surprising, when you consider that
A)it covers the elderly, who are possibly the most expensive sector in terms of medical costs in the population, and
B)the elderly are rising in absolute numbers.
The Magic Free Market already rations care by cost, in the form of denying coverage to millions, creating incentives against the use of care in the short run (i.e., making deductibles so high that nobody risks going to their general physician until a problem is already serious), and arguably under-insuring vast sectors of the population.
I’ve had enough with it, frankly, and am ready to try something different.
You mean as opposed to allowing some faceless asshole bureaucrat in the HMOs try and deny me coverage because my grandfather had some medical condition, or to deny me coverage once I’m sick using the “rescission” practice (which all of the private insurers have said they intend to keep under any deal) of going through the paperwork and niggling out some technicality to completely cut off care, forcing me into a lawsuit battle which may very well decide the outcome of my life? That’s something that quite a few Americans face every day.
Keep the bullshit to yourself. If it were up to me, we’d move towards a Canadian-style single-payer tomorrow, where the government simply sets a fee schedule for a certain set of treatments, and let’s the market do the rest.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
And why does Bauchus say it’s too late to throw single payer into the mix now?
June 25th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Bob, I think it is that the insurers say it’s too late.
Actually, until they tell us what it *IS,* they can throw anything into the mix.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Mary’s comments re the 80% satisfied healthcare plan seems dubious at best. If that be the case why do we see poll after poll that people want a change? First, most people do not attach a “quality” metric of any kind other than they “seem to feel better” after seeing their doctor. Since at least 37% of these people get their plan from their employer & have zero to say, yes, they have to be satisfied. Interestingly though, their employer had to judge what their salaries would be annually in the light of the ever increasing 6-10% annual premiums. I dont think folks really cogitate well on this issue. Imagine what the future could bring with the ability to capture vast amounts of data which would really tell us which plans deliver value and which do not. Imagine doctors employing the very, very best procedures and the cutting edge pharmaceuticals to cure your illness in half the time. Imagine the potential reductions in cost to your pocketbook now. Could we avoid the 7-30% profit the big insurance companies and their shareholders now enjoy? Certainly we could reduce these by 2/3 or more with a modest 1$ Trillion investment, derived from the currently duplicative, wasteful, fraudulent system. Just imagine the future……..
June 25th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
And besides, I think Baucus is regretful not because he left single-payer off the table. Far from it. He was paid well to keep it off the table. What he really regrets is the blowback he’s received, and the fact that he so badly misjudged the intelligence of his constituents.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:44 am
We were able to dump a PaidFor Republican , Conrad. Now, Let’s start planning the Dumping of this Bought and Paid For Democrat, Baucus, as soon as possible. Yesterday wouldn’t be too soon. Surely his new job on K Street is waiting, just like Billy Tauzin, Bugman DeLay, Livingston, Ashcroft, and all the other sellouts.
June 26th, 2009 at 7:59 am
[...] Matt Yglesias doesn’t get it: I thin that’s right. Framing effects are important in politics. The public-private competition is supposed to be a compromise between the pristine vision of single-payer and the desire of private insurers not to be put out of business. It creates a situation in which insurers are challenged to prove that single-payer advocates are wrong, rather than simply assert it. But with no single-payer plan in the mix, this gets lost, and the compromise becomes the leftmost anchor of the debate. A single-payer plan couldn’t possibly have passed, but I think having hearings on single-payer and having one committee draft a serious single-payer bill that gets a serious CBO score would have been a useful exercise. In particular, it would have focused the mind on the costs involved in rejecting this option. [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
[...] excludes the public option. Even Max Baucus, who is famously agnostic on the public option, now acknowledges that single-payer should have been included for this [...]
June 28th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
[...] John Cole at the excellent Balloon Juice, Matt Yglesias gives us a succinct explanation of one of the manifestations of the Democratic malaise of timidity which continues to bedevil [...]
June 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
“Sitting Senator”? Where was he sitting? Were you looking up?
June 29th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Curious to hear more re: Brett’s comment on rescinding provision in health insurance contracts. Hadn’t seen this one before.