Flawed Baucus Bill is Not the Roadmap

Stuart Butler / September 16, 2009

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has been engaged in a good-faith effort to build potentially broad bipartisan support for health care reform. If carried out on a far wider scale with members of both parties, in both houses, and with the good-faith involvement of the President, such a process could lead to the kind of bipartisan health reforms Americans would believe in. To do that, the President needs to hit the “reset” button and bring together a wide set of members with a fresh roadmap – and the Baucus bill is not that roadmap. Many of its key provisions are badly flawed. Some examples are:

While it drops explicit endorsement of a public option, the legislation creates a CO-OP which is literally an acronym for a new federal program – not the empowerment of existing co-ops – and it is in reality a thinly disguised public option.

It applies a 35 percent excise tax on higher-cost plans, together with a new sales tax on pharmaceutical, health insurers, clinical laboratories and medical device manufacturers. These taxes will be passed through to patients. While self-insured health plans, typically offered by employers and including most union-negotiated plans, will not face the insurer tax, they will still be subject to the higher-cost plan tax. (more…)