One mistake I think you can fairly tag Barack Obama with was endorsing Max Baucus’ $900 billion total price tag for health reform in Tuesday’s speech. That number was already low, and as Steve Benen points out the nature of certain “moderate” senators seems to be that whatever’s on the table always needs to be scaled back for no real reason to some different lower round number. Thus:
Another Republican negotiator voiced concerns to Fox. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-ME, said there is still concern about the size of the package which is carrying a near $900 billion price tag. “Maybe we could shrink that to $800 billion or below,” the moderate senator said, citing a skeptical public with bailout fatigue and concern for rising deficits.
Maybe!
It’s difficult for me to understand how turning a deficit-neutral $900 billion program into a deficit-neutral $800 billion program should alleviate concern for rising deficits. If you want to take more of a hammer to deficits, what you need to do is propose something considerably more ambitious than Baucuscare—either a single-payer plan or Wyden-Bennett or something else equally dramatic. You can just take the Baucus plan and slice off $10 billion a year at random, but this leaves the deficit the same and just gives people less health care. Unless, of course, you try to find the savings through adopting the sort of robust public option which Snowe opposes.
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