Senator Max Baucus
Senator Max Baucus’s proposal has all the ingredients for failure and eroding our freedom: mandatory insurance, employer mandate, and expansion of SCHIP. Michael Tanner at Cato writes:
You may be perfectly satisfied with the insurance you have today, but that wouldn’t matter. If the bureaucrats didn’t think it was good enough, you would have to give up your current policy, and buy the one they wanted—even if it was more expensive or contained benefits you would never use and didn’t want. …
Sen. Baucus also supports an employer mandate requiring “all except the smallest” businesses to either offer health insurance to all their workers or pay an additional tax as a penalty. … Businesses will almost inevitably respond by reducing hiring or cutting back on wages or other benefits. Any proposal that is likely to make business less likely to hire workers is a particularly bad idea right now with the economy sliding into a recession.
Sen. Baucus would also impose a host of new insurance regulations that will increase the cost of coverage, including “community rating” … it will force the young and healthy to pay significantly higher premiums to cross-subsidize those who are older and sicker. …
Health insurance would be reduced to little more than a public utility, operating much like, for example, the electric company, with the government regulating and controlling every aspect of the operation. …
And yes, it gets worse. Read the whole piece here.
