Helena Handbag
by Cathy Siegner
Queen City News
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
I’ve never met Max Baucus, but I know plenty of people who have, and their opinions range from loathing to admiration. People who like him say he’s got a good heart and genuinely tries to help his constituents and his country. If he cares about an issue, say preserving the Rocky Mountain Front or funding the SCHIP program, he digs in his heels and refuses to budge.
That’s why it’s so difficult to understand why he’s digging in his heels in opposing something a significant number of Americans want: single-payer health-care reform. He seems to think his congressional colleagues won’t vote for it no matter how many people they hear from supporting it, so that’s that.
In Washington, D.C., this is the common, pragmatic view, especially when lobbyists are telling elected officials to slow down, take their time, and not to stick their necks out — messages members of Congress tend to listen to, given their general lack of backbone and avid interest in staying in office.
The latest tool in the anti-single-payer toolbox is the price tag: ranging from tens of billions up to $1 trillion over 10 years, depending on who’s doing the estimating. Supporters say any cost estimate is inherent misleading because of all the money we’re wasting with our current inefficient system.
For example, they say that private insurance companies skim off an estimated $400 billion per year in administrative costs, and lobbying groups are said to be shelling out an estimated $1.5 million per day to defeat reform.
To hear reform opponents talk, you’d think they guarded every penny coming out of Washington. Yet they didn’t bat an eye last fall when approving $700 billion in virtually undocumented corporate bailout money. And you never hear them talk about how much our current health-care system is costing us (an estimated $6,401 per person in 2005, or 15.3 percent of GDP that year).
When people oppose a single-payer system, I wonder if they have health coverage and whether it’s Medicare, VA, or some other government-funded plan; in other words, a single-payer system. A lot of times, they do. So basically, it’s okay for all of us to pay for them to have single-payer coverage, but they’ll be doggoned if they’ll chip in so everybody else can have it, too. In my world, that’s called hypocrisy.
President Obama noted as much during his speech last week. He acknowledged that he has the best health care in the world and that a doctor literally follows him around to make sure he’s okay. I suspect that Obama sees this hypocrisy inherent in the health-care reform debate and doesn’t care for it.
(Interestingly, even Obama’s personal physician before he became president, Chicago internist David Scheiner, has publicly called for a single-payer health care system.)
Baucus has to be reeling from the letters, emails, petitions, and other negative feedback he’s been getting because of his opposition to single-payer health care. No member of Congress, regardless of seniority or how many “powerful” committees he chairs, likes that. It’s bad for morale and bad for getting reelected.
Then there’s the tons of money he’s gotten from the insurance industry and others who don’t want health-care reform, at least not the kind that cuts out their profits. Some dot-connecting was made visible in Helena and other cities last Friday when single-payer advocates marched from Blue Cross Blue Shield to the senator’s office carrying big replicas of donation checks.
National Public Radio ran an embarrassing piece last week called “Who has access to Max Baucus?” (available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106655060&sc=emaf).
It discussed how Montana’s senior senator received nearly half of his 2008 re-election haul of $11.6 million from sources outside the state and those involved in health insurance and other industries which the Finance Committee oversees. Only 13 percent came from Montanans. He reportedly quit accepting money from health-industry political action committees (PACs) June 1, but then took, and later returned, $5,000 from a Schering Plough fund June 15.
NPR also mentioned his ski and snowmobile weekends with donors, golf and fly-fishing trips ($2,500 per person), and his successful Glacier PAC. There was even a “Baucus influence map” provided, showing five former staffers are now lobbying for pharmaceutical firms and other corporations, which graphically illustrates the value of access on influence (and income) in Washington.
Also mentioned was “Camp Baucus”, his annual soiree for supporters taking place this weekend at Big Sky, where tickets start at $2,500 per person. Some single-payer supporters from Helena were planning to drive down there later this week and hold signs along the road heading up to Big Sky showing their position on health-care reform.
Congress will be taking August off without voting on health-care reform, although iconoclastic U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, managed to get bipartisan committee support a couple weeks ago for his amendment permitting states to adopt their own form of single-payer health care. That move could turn out to be a significant one and bears watching.