Max Baucus has released his new healthcare reform plan. Here's all you need to know:
1) It mostly sucks. No public option. Because he continues to obsess on bipartisanship.
2) Grassley and Enzi don't support it anyway. So much for bipartisanship.
So, no public plan, no co-ops, no trigger. No bipartisanship. No surprise.
Baucus didn't include a public option, but he included major caps and fees on the health insurance cartel. If he's going to piss off his financiers anyway, why not include the public option?
Now can we have his original plan from less than a year ago -- the one with a robust public option?
UPDATE: The more I read about this draft bill, the more it looks like a junk bill to give cover to the centrists. But of course this is cover in a make-believe world in which shit is good. In reality, this Baucus bill is really effing bad and it will have a very short life span. And if it doesn't, the political life spans of the Democrats who vote for it will be almost as short. Anyway, I digress. This looks like a centrist bill for the sake of having a centrist bill reconciled with the HELP bill. In other words, the Baucus bill -- if it makes it out of committee -- will be watered down in reconciliation, then again in conference. And at the end of the day, Baucus and his fellow cowards and crooks can say they tried to do their duty: to pass an unprecedentedly huge corporate windfall.