You people = the centrist Democrats.
As we get closer to the release of the awful Baucus Plan, the details are becoming increasingly clear. The price tag is estimated at just under $880 billion over ten years, and the CBO has obviously not weighed in with its scoring but it's very likely their results will land in the same range.
Revisiting what I wrote yesterday, the Senate HELP Committee bill -- the Kennedy Bill -- was scored at $611 billion over ten years, according to the CBO. With the public option! That's $269 billion less expensive than the Baucus Crapola.
The biggest difference between the two bills, of course, is the existence of the public option in the Kennedy Bill. In fact, early scoring of the Kennedy Bill before the public option was added estimated the total at $1 trillion. Once the public option was added, the CBO revised the price tag of the bill downwards by nearly $400 billion.
But $269 billion is still a massive amount of savings. That's more than 25 percent of the cost of the Baucus Bill.
Does the Kennedy Bill cost less? Yes.
Does the Baucus Bill cost much more? Absolutely.
Do the centrist Democrats claim to be fiscal conservatives? Yep.
Do the centrist Democrats support the fiscally responsible bill? Of course not.
The centrist budget hawks in the Democratic Party would rather support the more expensive Baucus Plan, and there are (questionable) rumors of a pair of Republicans who also support this bill. And now that the president has pledged to not sign a bill that adds "one dime" to the deficit, he would certainly be better served with a bill that includes the public option.
FACT: The fiscally responsible bill is clearly the Kennedy Bill. The Baucus Bill is a monster, both in terms of how it's written and what it costs.