What was the point of this bill? Few, if any Republicans will support any reform package. Democrats should just stay mostly with a House version and a public option. They won’t lose any Republican votes, they were never there. Why compromise with yourself?

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People need to be able to opt out of the individual mandate if the lowest cost premium is >10% of income. This was one of the best parts of the previous version of the Baucus plan and it seems to be gone. Without the Public Option, “Opt out” is the only tool left to pressure insurers to keep premiums under control.

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The Baucus Proposal won’t help me and my husband be able to afford health care. What happened to the public option! We already pay 13% in health care costs and can barely afford to. Why not lower the Medicare age to 55, or even 45.

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Baucus’s Gang of Cash is a travesty, and so is his proposal, which is nothing but a delivery system for big subsidies to private insurers. Better no bill than this one.

Get it through your head people, the Republicans are never going to support any Democratic health care reform bill even if it were exactly what they wanted. Their whole agenda is to thwart the president, it doesn’t matter what the legislation is, they are never going to back it. They are just sitting back and laughing at people like Baucus who keep moving to the right trying to get their votes.

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Utter garbage. We need a single payer system. If a democratic congress can’t fix this what we really need is new government. We spend 16% of GDP on health care and rank just below Slovenia in outcomes. Most of Europe spends half that with much better outcomes. Capitalism is broken, big money, big corporations have destroyed this country. What we need are pitchforks…

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Number 1: It is unconstitutional for the US govt to tell me I have to buy ANYTHING. So that will not fly…Thank heavens Obama and crowd will be gone in 2012 and this stupidity can be reversed.

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I welcome any effort to get a hold of the outrageous practices of the insurance conglomerates. I’ve spent my entire morning on the phone with a customer service rep for my wife’s former insurance company attempting to get them to pay a claim from our son’s birth in May ‘07. This battle has been going on for a year and a half and hundreds of hours have been wasted trying to convince the company what their duty and obligation is pursuant to our policy…When looking over all the documentation, with the cost of coverage, copay, deductible and out of payment costs due to denial of coverage, the pregnancy would have been less expensive if we had NO insurance. What a racket.

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It seems like a lot of money being spent to do some fairly underwhelming things. It’s a nice incremental step, but considering how its Republican opponents are depicting it as a step towards the socialist-fascist-communist-illegal-alien takeover of all healthcare, with the very American way of life in the balance it would be nice to see it do more.
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I like it a lot. It moves us in the right direction, but is affordable and incremental. An incremental approach is much better than a complete overhaul, because we can identify and fix problems at each step.

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Yet again this goes to the point of why the dems are ridiculous on this- they are treating this like an insurance problem when its really a cost problem. The problem is not that the insurance companies are gouging the american people- its that people cannot afford the level of healthcare they need. But while the democrats think they have an easier time demonizing the insurance companies to get this passed they are doing nothing at all to fix the cost problem.

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Less money for the middle class.
Big fine if you opt out of insurance coverage.
More customers for insurance companies.
Who’s winning here?

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I hate these ‘budget hawk’ demorcats that always make us pay more for the same thing. They are the types of idiots that make medicare part D a handout to drug makers, while slashing coverage, and say ‘I just want to be responsible.’

No, you just want money, shill.

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Failure to subsidize is a new tax when you force people to buy something whether they want it or not. If before you had a choice on whether or not to buy insurance and then you were forced to buy insurance, the mandate to buy something whether you want it or not is a new tax.

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You still don’t get it do you. Baucus doesn’t give a whit about bipartisanship. He doesn’t work for you and me, he works for the Insurance Industry.

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I really hate to be so pessimistic, especially after the euphoria of January 20, but the entrenched interests are just so entrenched I don’t see any way out short of hauling out the pitchforks. If Baucuscare passes, I  think the younger and poorer people who voted in Obama will be much worse off and likely to feel betrayed, to the great detriment of the Dem Party.

Obama missed a real chance to take a stand for the people against the powerful, but by capitulating (or deluding himself that he could “bring people together” and “change the tone”) he is not likely to get reform that would really improve the lot of enough people.

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It is clearly the middle class who is screwed here, as people up to 133% of poverty will be better off, maybe even to 200%. This is going to excite the resentment of the people at 200% to 300% or 400% who will feel they are screwed to give poor people more care, and the GOP will exploit this as they always do.