Ezra had two posts on his blog about Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus' landmark new policy paper on health care reform.
Do not think of this as Max Baucus's health care plan. It isn't. Not yet. As of now, it's a policy paper, not a piece of legislation. It is the beginning of Max Baucus's attempt to create a health care reform process. What Baucus has offered is not the Max Baucus health care plan, but the generic Democratic health care plan. The place from which the policy process among congressional Democrats can start. It is extremely similar to the Obama plan if you added a mandate, and to the Clinton and Edwards plans if you left them untouched. If you liked those plans -- and most Democrats, eventually, did -- you like this one. It's as basic as that. The plan is really less a legislative document than a concrete articulation of what politically attuned Democrats currently understand to be the party's consensus of health reform, and this document is part of Baucus's bid to lead the resulting legislative process. It is not Baucus's final say on what the eventual product will look like.
And the politics:
There are a couple things going on here. I can't say if they're intended or not. It's possible that the whole political strategy is fairly inchoate on Baucus's part, and putting out a plan just seemed the logical next step. But I doubt it. Here, in any case, are the immediate ramifications of his proposal. As a caveat to this post, many of these might not come true. They just seem to be the path the strategy envisions:
The first and most obvious impact is on Baucus's stature. He just moved from Possible Player to Player. He's first out of the gate with a health reform plan. His position as chair of the Senate Finance Committee means his priorities are more than mere preference or moral exhortation: They are actionable. He controls the relevant committee, and if he decides it's doing health care, then it's doing health care. That's not to say he won't come to some sort of accommodation with Obama's preferences on sequencing, but it will be an accommodation that recognizes Baucus's agenda, too. The dude's got power.
And don't miss his profile of Baucus in the last print issue:
Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Staffers like to say that the committee is responsible for all the money the government raises and half of what it spends -- and that's not too far from the truth. It is the only Senate committee able to construct new funding streams, which gives it incredible authority over the country's social-policy architecture. It has control over taxes and trade, Social Security and Medicare, health reform and unemployment benefits. Even a carbon-pricing bill would probably need its sign-off. "Everyone in Congress always worries they'll end up on the Subcommittee for Acoustics and Ventilation," jokes Sen. Ron Wyden, a Finance Committee member. "The Senate Finance Committee is the opposite. It's the forum where the biggest financial decisions of our day come, and we have to figure [out] how to tackle them."
--The Editors