Baucus balks at bucking healthcare status quo

The insurance industry must have been awash in bubbly glee as the Senate Finance Committee Chairman’s healthcare proposal came in dead on arrival.

Capitulating almost entirely to the industry consigliere, Baucus and his gang of six’s crash and burn sent nary a ripple of reform across the status quo that has cast shame on congress’s historic mishandling of its responsibilities to provide reasonable healthcare coverage to our citizenry.

Rather than institute simple and fundamental reforms to a system bloated with inefficiencies and inequity, Baucus proposed beating more fees out of middle class “Cadillac” plans that are barely able to meet the needs of their ratepayers.

More than anything, his “plan” has succumbed to the health insurance industry’s scheme to get the taxpayer to subsidize their cost-shifts to higher deductable and more expensive limited-benefit plans, a scenario that will inevitably result in raising an already extreme rate of medically forced bankruptcies throughout our nation.

Personally, every time reform opponents rail against a public option choice, I wonder why anyone would worry that our inept government might in fact make for some serious competition to the status quo – and if it can, what does that say about the entrenched private interests that have persistently prescribed the sorry circumstances under which we all currently suffer?

Tom Casey