Were Bad, just the ones suggested by Clinton" memos to start circulating.

"Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."
Carl Schurz - U.S. Senator 1/17/1872

mandates are useless and also requirements that no company can refuse to give coverage or give lesser coverage to some but not others. (other things too)

--which predates Obama, but allows them to pretend they're doing something on healthcare.

and Obama and his people are very very against mandates of all kinds, so they'd probably make them cut that part out--if they ever bother making this a priority.

Her name wasn't mentioned in that piece at all and it sounds suspiciously like it was lifted from her campaign dossier.

Why are they trying to rub her out???

Come together at The Confluence

But now Max Baucus — Max Baucus! — is leading the charge on a health care plan that, at least at first read, is more like Hillary Clinton’s than Barack Obama’s; that is, it looks like an attempt at full universality. (The word I hear, by the way, is that Obama’s opposition to mandates was tactical politics, not conviction — so he may well be prepared to do the right thing now that the election is won.)

So this looks very good for the reformers. There’s now a reasonable chance that universal health care will be enacted next year! (My emphasis; Krugman italicized second Max Baucus; I italicized the bit about Obama's conviction.)

Oh, and those italicized words about Obama's tactical vs. conviction "stands" do not make me feel really good.

"... Now, the bad. Mandates can be a forced market for insurance companies - in fact, they favor it in exchange for health care reform. Baucus' proposal is not a single-payer system. He came right out and said today that "I don't think a single payer health care system makes sense in this country, we are America, we will come up with a uniquely American health care system that's a combination of public and private." That kind of exceptionalism just makes no sense against economic reality. If the insurance industry can pawn off the sick onto the public plans, those costs will rise while insurers take in record profits. There is a clause in the proposal that "Private insurers offering coverage through the (Health Insurance) Exchange would
be precluded from discrimination based on pre-existing conditions," which is great, but insurers have used other means, like recsission (retroactively kicking people off the insurance rolls when they file a claim because they "lied on their forms"), to get out of paying for treatment. There also doesn't appear to be any language that insurers must spend a significant portion of their premiums of actual care. As for the cost controls, there's this clause, "The plan also considers careful reforms of medical malpractice laws that
could lower administrative costs and health spending throughout the system, while ensuring that injured patients are compensated fairly for their losses," which sounds like another round of tort reform to me.

It's hard to fully trust Baucus. He wrote the first Bush tax cut and he helped shepherd the Medicare Part D prescription drug bill which was a giveaway to industry. ..." -- http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/b...

sorta --

Goals Of Baucus’ Plan:
· Achieve universal coverage
· Reduce health care costs
· Improve the quality of care our system provides
· Baucus’ vision for achieving these objectives includes an individual responsibility to hold health insurance – once quality, affordable, care is accessible to all.
· His plan seeks to reach that point through measures to shore up the employer-based system, through a one-stop insurance marketplace for individuals and businesses, and through limited expansions of public programs.

basically he's mostly buying [and/or selling] the standard republican-lite line that we can reduce costs with geekiness like electronic health records, and making healthcare consumers more sensitive to price [because like yanno insurance insulates you from knowing how much your healthcare really costs], and ...

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/11/... --
Moving Forward on Health Care --

"With the exception of what we're hearing from a few people like Jonathan Cohn, the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom of the Washington pundit class is that health care reform is a non-starter next year. The assumption taking hold is that Barack Obama simply can't afford to tackle it; he can't afford the money, and he can't afford the political capital. The way things generally work in Washington, the longer that idea stays out there, the more likely it is to become a reality.

That would be unfortunate, if recent history is any guide. In 1993, Bill Clinton decided to put off health care reform until his second year, focusing instead on putting some points on the board with his deficit-reduction plan and NAFTA. The hope was that these victories would add momentum that would aid the health care effort. The reality turned out to be the opposite: ..."