Free Republic

Pelosi Bill - page 297 of bill explains the punishment for not purchasing government mandated health insurance. If you don’t buy what the government considers “acceptable health care coverage,” you’re going to be hit with a tax of at least 2.5% of your income. And if you don’t pay that new tax, you could be fined as much as $250,000 and sentenced to up to five years in prison. Baucus Bill – does just the opposite. It calls for a much lighter penalty ($750 maximum) for people who don’t buy government approved health coverage, making it cheaper to pay the...

Pelosi Bill - page 297 of bill explains the punishment for not purchasing government mandated health insurance. If you don’t buy what the government considers “acceptable health care coverage,” you’re going to be hit with a tax of at least 2.5% of your income. And if you don’t pay that new tax, you could be fined as much as $250,000 and sentenced to up to five years in prison. Baucus Bill – does just the opposite. It calls for a much lighter penalty ($750 maximum) for people who don’t buy government approved health coverage, making it cheaper to pay the...

Don't buy the claim that the Sen ate health-care bill is substantially more moderate than the House measure. While Speaker Nancy Pelosi's legislation is even more onerous than the package created by Sen. Max Baucus and now championed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the larger story is how similar the two Democratic bills are. First, we need to get past the misleading accounting games. Each bill is routinely "scored" for its 10-year costs from 2010-19. Yet this includes several years when the spending wouldn't yet have kicked in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fully 99.9 percent of the...

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman's opposition to public-option healthcare delivers a serious -- but not necessarily fatal -- blow to Majority Leader Harry Reid's plans to squeeze a major healthcare reform bill through the Senate. Lieberman indicated on Tuesday that Senate approval of a public-option plan would be fiscally irresponsible because it "creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line." Without Lieberman, Reid will now focus on garnering support from other moderate Senate Democrats. Several say they want to review the actual legislation before deciding whether to support it. One reflection of the sketchy...

Congressional Democrats are set to announce Tuesday legislation aimed at squeezing more information from foreign banks and U.S. citizens with offshore accounts to ferret out tax evaders. The bill from Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.), and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), includes some of President Barack Obama's proposals to fight offshore tax cheating. According to a summary of the bill obtained by Dow Jones Newswires, it is expected to raise $8.5 billion for the U.S. government over 10 years. Foreign banks with U.S. customers would face a 30% withholding tax on income from...

Baucus Supports Reid's MoveOctober 26, 2009 In announcing a health care bill with a public option, it sounds like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has already lined up the support of Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT). Said Baucus: "It is time to make our system work better for patients and providers, for small business owners and for our economy. It is time for health care reform. For more than a year, we've been working to meet the goals of reducing the growth of health care costs, improving quality and efficiency and expanding coverage. There are a tremendous number...

We are nominating Sen. Baucus' health care reform bill for the Pulitzer Prize — for fiction. Like works of great fiction writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story line of the Baucus bill is not what it seems and is in fact a clever subterfuge of what health care reform will mean for the American people. Hiding behind this facade is another story about a massive power grab by the Washington political establishment. The bill is loaded with fiction. To begin with, it purports to reduce the deficit. This is really an Enron-style scam...

Democrats are pushing Senate leaders and the White House to speed up key benefits in the health reform bill to 2010, eager to give the party something to show taxpayers for their $900 billion investment in an election year. The most significant changes to the health care system wouldn’t kick in until 2013 – two election cycles away. With Republicans expected to make next year a referendum on health care reform, Democrats are quietly lobbying to push up the effective dates on popular programs, so they'll have something to run on in the congressional midterms. Democrats are anxious to mix...

Democrats Are Optimistic That Public Option Will Be Approved By JOSEPH BERGER October 25, 2009 Several Democratic senators voiced optimism on Sunday that Congress would pass a health care bill containing at least the germ of a government-run insurance program. Their expectations were grudgingly seconded by Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008. “I think the Democrats have the votes, and in the House, Blue Dogs bark but never bite,” Mr. McCain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” using the nickname for conservative Democrats . “So I don’t think they have a problem over in the House side....

WASHINGTON (AP) - Businesses would not be required to provide health insurance under legislation being readied for Senate debate, but large firms would owe significant penalties if any worker needed government subsidies to buy coverage on their own, according to Democratic officials familiar with talks on the bill. For firms with more than 50 employees, the fee could be as high as $750 multiplied by the total size of the work force if only a few workers needed federal aid, these officials said. That is a more stringent penalty than in a bill that recently cleared the Senate Finance Committee,...

Who Picks Up The Tab For Health Reform? Insurance companies stand to lose; doctors look like winners Jane Sasseen and Catherine Arnst The odds are shifting in favor of health-care reform legislation making it through Congress this year, to the point where bookies could put money on the ultimate winners and losers. Many details have yet to be determined, as congressional leaders try to merge two Senate and three House proposals, all of them more than 1,000 pages long. And beyond the contentious battle over the public insurance option, there's a huge fight over another question: Who will pay to...

Poring over the details of the 1,501-page health care bill that came out of Sen. Max Baucus' Finance Committee, it's clear that the financing is so full of smoke and mirrors that one has to wear a respirator and hard hat to get through it. But by the time one gets to the end of the bill, estimated to cost $829 billion over 10 years, clarity emerges — the Democrats plan to finance their expanded government care on the backs of America's middle-class taxpayers. Baucus and company have decided to tax what the press calls "Cadillac" health plans. Prior to...

You have to read all the way to page A-25 in today’s New York Times to learn about it, but the Senate took its first floor vote on Obamacare yesterday and the White House lost. Big. The NYT reports: “Democrats lost a big test vote on health care legislation on Wednesday as the Senate blocked action on a bill to increase Medicare payments to doctors at a cost of $247 billion over 10 years. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, needed 60 votes to proceed. He won only 47. And he could not blame Republicans. A dozen...

WASHINGTON -- Hopes of getting health care reform through the Senate look grim. Democratic leaders suffered a major blow Wednesday when some of their own voted against a Medicare rate bill seen as a test for broader reform. It’s called the “doc fix” -- legislation to increase Medicare payments to doctors with a price tag of $247 billion over the next decade. It was supposed to be part of the cost of health care. But in order to bring the health care reform bill in under budget, Democrats simply moved that expense out of health care into another part of...

Link only - Baucus Ballistic, According to ABC News

Under the "health care" heading on the White House Web site, a paragraph reads: "The President has vowed that the health reform process will be different in his Administration – an open, inclusive, and transparent process where all ideas are encouraged and all parties work together to find a solution to the health care crisis." But after dozens of televised hearings, round tables, markups and press conferences, top White House officials are now meeting in the Capitol with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Max Baucus of Montana, away from Republicans and the press,...

Excise Tax on High-Cost Health Plans. New 40% excise tax on health insurance plans to the extent they exceed $26,000 in cost ($9850 single). Exemptions made for over-55 retirees and “high-risk” professions; high-cost states phased in... See the full list at atr.org...

Sending Anita Dunn—who is probably not enjoying her proverbial 15 minutes of fame—out onto the north lawn of the White House to attack Fox News is serving its purpose. The responsibility for determining which of the national news networks are legitimate and which ones are not is something the founders did not include in the executive powers section of the Constitution. One might even argue that the inclusion of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights is a pretty clear sign they thought that giving any part of the federal government the power to do so would not, to...

Legislative Process: Democrats are said to offer physicians a deal — freezing Medicare payment cuts if the docs sign on to health care reform. This is pricey bribery even by Washington standards. Sooner or later, health care reform is going to hit taxpayers' wallets. House Democrats want to start right away with the rich, naturally. Their counterparts in the Senate are more circumspect or shifty, depending on your point of view. There, reform has a fiscally conservative facade that masks some very expensive wheeling and dealing. Witness what's happened since the Senate Finance Committee approved a reform plan that, taken...

Without any idea what it is doing, Congress is about to pulverize the American medical system, put the health insurance companies out of business, and set the federal budget on a runaway course that may end up wrecking the entire economy. So if you'd like to know why all this is happening, here's a brief review: The "crisis" in health insurance exists because the government is already mismanaging the system. The problem began in 1945 when Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson Act. Even though insurance had long been sold across state lines, the states were allowed to regulate, with the benign...

The Senate Finance Committee has posted the legislative language of S. 1796 -- the 1,502-page America's Healthy Future Act bill -- on its website. The committee staff directed the AHFA bill proposal under the direction of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. For weeks, the proposal was simply a rough summary, with no bill number. Republicans complained that they had not seen actual bill provisions.

Max Baucus: Public option still part of health care reform debate… It’s just less ‘pure’October 19, 2009 by Mary Vanac WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus told reporters Monday afternoon that he isn’t sure the Senate can muster the votes needed to pass health care reform that contains a “pure public option.” “This issue is alive” Baucus told reporters during a teleconference organized by Families USA, a consumer health care advocate. “We’re looking at it to see what makes the most sense,” the Democrat from Montana said in answer to a question about whether a government-backed health...

Here's a new one: a union sounding the alarm about high taxes. Even stranger: The union's target is President Obama and his health-care overhaul -- specifically Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus' bill. Now, when a union complains about taxes, you just know they must be over the top. Indeed, they are. Gerald McEntee, president of the 1.6 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees warns that the Baucus bill's tax hikes will hit the middle class hard. Specifically, he argues that the bill's tax on medical-insurance plans amounts to "asking the middle class to pay for the...

Senate Finance Committee members have been notified that the committee's health reform bill was filed today. S. 1796 weighs in at 1,502 pages, according to a Senate Republican leadership source. It's still not up yet on the Finance Committee website or Thomas.gov. We'll post a link as soon as we get one.

WASHINGTON (AP) - For Democrats determined to get a health care bill, U.S. Sen. Roland Burris can no longer be ignored. The Illinois Democrat says he'll only vote for a bill to provide health care to millions more Americans as long as it allows the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers. And he says he won't compromise. That's caught the attention of the very Democratic leaders who tried to keep Burris out of the Senate after he was appointed by disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, however, says he feels strongly...

In politics, it's impossible to know just how serious such a statement is. For Democrats determined to get a health care bill, Sen. Roland Burris is like the house guest who couldn't be refused, won't soon be leaving and poses a plausible threat of ruining holiday dinner. Suddenly, he can no longer be ignored. The Illinois Democrat, appointed by disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, says he'll only vote for a bill to provide health care to millions more Americans as long as it allows the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers.

Sarah Palin's facebook page has been relatively quiet lately. She made it louder with a roughly 1000 word commentary on the Baucus bill. Most of the criticism echoed that of the Price Waterhouse report released earlier last week. The main criticism comes down to the idea that pre existing conditions will no longer stop someone from being covered but the penalties for not having coverage will be small. The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. [1] It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance...

Now that the Senate Finance Committee has approved its health care bill, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at the long term consequences should its provisions be enacted into law. The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. [1] It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.

When he was a presidential candidate, Barack Obama promised to make negotiations over healthcare reform an open and transparent process. Now that he's president, the reality is that most of the high-stakes work is being conducted by just three senators behind closed doors. According to the Washington Post, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., gather in Reid's office to hammer out a merger of competing bills before a Senate vote. The only other people allowed in the room are key aides and Obama's representatives on healthcare reform. More than a year...

'Doc fix' no longer up for cloture on MondayBy Tony Romm - 10/18/09 02:34 PM ET Senate Democrats have decided to postpone Monday's scheduled cloture vote on a bill that would reform how Medicare reimburses doctors and hospitals. Initially, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) scheduled his motion to end floor debate and bring the so-called 'doc fix bill' to a final vote at the beginning of next week. But the leader reportedly changed his mind on Friday, deciding instead to he would vitiate Monday's vote so both parties' lawmakers could broker an agreement on a few remaining amendments, his...

White House: Obama Not Demanding Government-Run Health Insurance OptionThe White House and lawmakers are trying to blend five versions of health care legislation into something that will pass Congress. But the House and Senate are deeply at odds over the so-called 'public option.' FOXNews.com Sunday, October 18, 2009 As White House aides said President Obama will not demand a government-run option be part of his sweeping health care overhaul bill, top Democrats refused to back down from their steadfast support of the so-called "public option" on Sunday. The war of words underscored the intraparty rift over the necessity of the...

The president wants a massive health care overhaul. He also wants to keep it under $900 billion over the next ten years, and he wants it be deficit neutral. So, how do the Democrats plan on accomplishing all these things? It's through Enron style accounting. 1) Collect taxes and revenues in year one but don't begin to provide services until year three. The CBO has become the "gold standard". Everyone has treated it as the gospel. It's so called scoring system has flaws however. It only takes the first ten years of revenues and expenses. So, how did the Baucus...

Back to the economic case against the Baucus health-care bill. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw looks at some new data from the Congressional Budget Office and calculates the marginal tax rate that the bill piles onto middle-class families: According to CBO, a family of four making $54,000 would pay $4,800 for health insurance. The rest of the premium would come from government subsidies. If the family’s income rises to $66,000, the subsidy falls, and the cost of health insurance rises to $7,600. In other words, earning an additional $12,000 requires the family to pay an additional $2,800. The implicit marginal...

The legislative process can also be a learning process, and as Congress considers health-care legislation -- the latest act being the Senate Finance Committee's vote in favor of Chairman Max Baucus' bill, or "conceptual language" -- we've been learning something useful. It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health-insurance coverage to almost all Americans, but that no one wants to pay for it. The learning process should have begun last February, when Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf indicated that the CBO didn't back the administration's assertion that preventive care would save money. But it still came...

Health Care: Democrats seem set to use the "nuclear option" to ram their government health takeover into law. Bipartisanship already looked dead; now it looks extinct. The health care revolution the Democratic Congress has planned — with its inevitable medical rationing, thousands of dollars in increased insurance premiums, and coverage of illegal aliens — may get placed on the familiar fast track used to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars this year. Instead of the 60 votes needed in the Senate if proper parliamentary rules were followed, passing this reshaping of the medical system as a "budget...

Or, I'm confused. There's two stories today that simply don't make sense together. First, here's the bold proclamation by Max Baucus. When it comes time to vote, every Democrat in the Senate -- and perhaps more than one Republican -- will support legislation overhauling the nation's health care system, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee predicted Thursday. That assertion by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., was a notable show of confidence coming in the midst of negotiations with Majority Leader Harry Reid and White House officials to finalize legislation that can satisfy liberal Democrats without alienating moderates -- and get...

Who is Sen.Baucus more scared of Rahm Emmanuel or an angry American people? You can call them bribes if you’d like. Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) health care bill is filled with pay-offs, bribes and graft to other senators just to get his mark up (it’s not in legislative format yet) proposal through the Senate Committee on Finance. This post details those bribes and provides the full text of the mark up. The Sound Off Sister got this story rolling on Tuesday this week after reading an opinion piece titled States of personal privilege in the Wall Street Journal by Kimberley...

<p>The Congressional Budget Office numbers are in, and America's politicians and self-defined experts in the media will be either extolling its accuracies or deriding its fantasies, to validate their own positions on the Baucus health plan. But beyond the CBO numbers themselves, many of which the CBO admits are either impossible to predict or likely to be proven untrue, Americans need to look more closely at the plan itself. Despite the repeated refrain by President Obama that "no one will lose their current insurance" and that benefits will not be cut, the fact is that the Baucus plan does precisely that, and more.</p>

SENATOR HARRY REID: He talked about CBO saying that there would be $54 billion saved each year if we put caps on medical malpractice and put some restrictions — tort reform — $54 billion. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it, Mr. President? The answer is yes. But remember, we’re talking about $2 trillion, $54 billion compared to $2 trillion. You can do the math. We can all do the math. It’s a very small percent.

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, shakes hands with Senator Olympia Snowe after the Committee passed the Democratic healthcare reform bill with a 14-9 vote on Capitol Hill, October 13, 2009.

Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget. As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse. Consider the bill put forward...

The Baucus bill will not only raise taxes, but it will kill jobs. Immediately upon its passage the necessary taxes will begin to hit our pay stubs. Large chunks of our salary will be confiscated to pay for illegal aliens and others who will suddenly have a legal claim to our wallets. The provisions of this bill won’t be felt in our everyday lives until 2013 but the money to fund them will be collected now. This is a double edged sword for us and our enemies. While we will suffer from the higher taxes, those higher taxes will fire...

White House, Top Democrats Begin Herculean Task of Merging Health Reform Bills With all five congressional health care bills making it out of committee, the White House and top Democrats must merge the different bills into versions that can pass in the House and the Senate, even as the Congressional Budget Office admits it can't confirm whether the legislation will save Americans a dime. WASHINGTON -- Now comes the hard part. With all five congressional health care bills finally out of committee and with a summer of tempestuous town hall meetings behind them, the White House and top Democrats must...

The Baucus health care bill passed the Senate Finance Committee yesterday by a vote of 14 to 9. The lone Republican who voted yes was Maine's Senator Olympia J. Snowe. This bill now joins four other versions of universal health care legislation that have advanced through the committee stage in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and are wending their way to the floor of each chamber in one form or another. And then there will be the Conference Committee, where the final bill will be hashed out behind close doors. The Baucus bill has no public health...

The Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation has analyzed the excise tax in the Baucus plan and come to the logical conclusion that it will raise prices for insurance policies. In two letters issued yesterday, the JCT acknowledged that the increased premium costs for health-insurance plans that qualify for the excise tax will increase costs to employers offering them, depressing wages directly or indirectly as a result, depending on whether they impose the total cost increase on employees. The second letter demonstrates that the effect of the Baucus plan and its disappearing subsidies on lower-income workers is to force them into...

Health care legislation back behind closed doorsSenate leaders start trying to merge bills by The Associated Press Wednesday October 14, 2009 WASHINGTON (AP) - Health care talks slip back behind closed doors Wednesday as Senate leaders start trying to merge two very different bills into a new version that can get the 60 votes needed to guarantee its passage. All eyes are on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has said he wants to complete the wedding quickly and get historic health care overhaul legislation onto the floor the week after next. Both bills were written by Democrats,...

"Public option" is like a bad penny, it always SEEMS to come back! Well now you knew that was going to happen. Two pieces of sound before I get into some details … although I am not sure why I am bothering. This bill will be decided behind closed doors, the language will change … and clearly, from Obama to Baucus, truth telling and nothing but the truth telling, is not their forte. First Florida Senator Bill Nelson, smiling from ear to ear, says now we can get down to the stuff we really want … government run health care....

THE Senate Finance Committee yesterday voted on a fraud: Sen. Max Baucus' "re sponsible" health-reform bill is actually a recipe for fiscal disaster -- and the Congressional Budget Office report that supposedly bolstered the bill actually exposes it.--snip--In its first two decades combined, the bill would cost $3.6 trillion and would raise taxes by $2.3 trillion...

Let's conduct a little experiment. We all heard today, in breathless email alerts from CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, that Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) went all mavericky and bravely bucked her party to vote with the Democrats on the Finance Committee in support of the Baucus health care bill. Of course, mathematically speaking, this is a non-issue. The Democrats outnumber the Republicans on the Committee by 13-10. They didn't need her and there was no danger that the bill would not pass.