No doubt insurance companies, but the elected reps responsible are 3 repubs, 3 demos, and Orin Hatch from states representing about 2-3% of the American poulation....fyi .....TM7
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/health-cares-gang-on-the-hill/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 28, 2009, 4:50 pm
Health Care’s ‘Gang’ on the Hill
By Eric Etheridge
The Blue Dogs have been hogging the health care spotlight for the last week. Now they’re having to share with it with the Senate Finance Committee chairman, Max Baucus, and the rest of his small troupe.
The Gang of Six — Baucus and five committee colleagues — got their picture in The Times today, a snappily annotated photograph of a recent meeting. The six senators gather twice daily, according to the accompanying article, in hopes of hammering out a “bipartisan deal” on health care reform.
Though their efforts are ongoing, significant details of of their emerging agreement are now circulating. So far, says Brien Beutler at TPMDC, the gang’s plan seems to be one that the U. S. Chamber of Commerce can support. In a recent letter, the Chamber reminded the negotiators that it opposes any “new government-run insurance plan” as well an “any mandate” on employers to provide insurance to workers or pay a tax. “That’s basically the plan Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee is set to propose,” writes Beutler.
The synchronicity between the Chamber and Gang plans should not be surprising, says Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. All you have to do is look at the Gang’s group portrait in The Times.
Look at this picture. Study it. This is who is in the room helping Baucus put together his bill. Olympia Snowe, Mike Enzi, Chuck Grassley, Jeff Bingaman and Kent Conrad. In a Senate of 60 Democrats and 40 Republicans, the health care reform bill is being written by three centrist Democrats, one centrist Republican, and two conservative Republicans. And until last week, Orrin Hatch was in the room, too.
For Matt Yglesias, this lineup represents a structural problem that he is wont to harp on, the shortage of direct democracy in our current system:
Not to just keep flogging a dead horse endlessly, but it does strike me as worth noting that when you read a puff piece in The New York Times about the Gang of Six bipartisan dealmakers in the Senate that vast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California. The six largest states, by contrast, contain about 40 percent of Americans.
Others are working this line of reasoning. At TPMCafe, Nathan Newman calls the situation “the tyranny of the tiny white states.” At Angry Bear, Robert Waldman says, “The U.S. Senate has an extreme rural bias.”
The states represented by the 6 senators (Iowa, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming) have a total of 13 representatives so the committee consists of half of the senators from states with 13 representatives and corresponds to 6.5 representatives, that is, less than 1.5 percent of the house and roughly 1.5 percent of the population.
The 6 are a tad embarrassed by this and say they have tried to take urban concerns into account (that’s Democracy at its best — people counting on the consideration of people they didn’t elect). According to Washington rules it is much more important that the bill have bipartisan support than that it have input from people elected by a significant fraction of the population.
At Balkinization, Frank Pasqule is working a different angle: insurance companies.
It turns out that a majority of the gang of six — Senators Baucus, Snowe, Conrad, and Grassley — hail from states with extraordinarily concentrated health insurance markets. As Catherine Arnst of Businessweek reports, “such market concentration has become a potent argument for supporters of a public insurer,” which would especially benefit consumers in those states. So guess what the Gang of Six has immediately taken off the table in reform talks? . . .
They’ve also dismissed an “income surtax on high earners” — because, hey, once you’ve already voted to give away $250 billion to the very wealthy in estate tax cuts, how could you possibly ask mere millionaires to chip in for health care?
Whatever the reason, Chris Hayes just wants to know, “What the hell is Max Baucus thinking !?!”
For Matt Taibbi, we have now arrived at the beginning of the end, an utterly predictable development: “Who among us did not know this would happen?”
But Baucus is a mere bit player in all this, says Taibbi. Focus instead on the higher-ups.
This has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (i.e., the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.
The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.
It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. …
This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?
Ezra Klein agrees with Taibbi that the situation so far is “completely predictable.” But his concern about the Baucus plan is much more dialed back, because he thinks there’s a “question is whether Baucus’s final product will matter.”
Rockefeller and the other Democrats on the committee have felt excluded from the negotiations and will want major changes before they can sign onto the final product. Then the Finance bill will have to be reconciled with the more liberal legislation built by the HELP Committee. Then it will have to go to the floor, where it will need the support of people like Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown just as much as it will need Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh. And then, if it passes those tests, it will have to be reconciled with the House’s legislation.
All of which is to say that the Baucus process is attracting an immense amount of interest, but the product may not look a lot like the bill that Congress eventually considers. And the reason is simple enough: Baucus’s process doesn’t look a lot like Congress. Baucus, Enzi, Snow, Grassley, Bingaman, and Conrad all think of themselves as dealmakers, but right now, they’re not cutting a deal on behalf of anyone but themselves.
