The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a health-care bill that just got a seal of approval from the Congressional Budget Office and is very likely to garner the vote of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe -- a twofer that gives the bill preeminence over four other health-care bills that have emerged from House and Senate committees over these long months. Unlike those bills, though, the Senate Finance bill won't have a public insurance option to compete with private insurers. Nor does it allow Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices, or adequately subsidize millions of middle-class families who will be required to buy health insurance that will be hard for them to afford. In short, it's a great deal for private insurers and Big Pharma, but not such a great deal for middle-class Americans. Meanwhile, the House banking committee is quietly circulating a draft set of reforms of financial markets likely to become the basis for whatever legislation emerges to fix the Street. Barney Frank, who heads the committee, is a thoughtful progressive. But the draft has gaping loopholes that will let most financial firms escape -- such as one that exempts corporations that deal in financial derivatives from any requirements for capital, business conduct, record-keeping, and reporting if they use derivatives for the purpose of "risk management," which is the very thing they all claim they're doing. Neither the draft bill, nor the committee, nor anyone on the Hill having anything to do with financial regulation, is raising what I consider to be the two key reforms necessary for avoiding another financial meltdown -- resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated commercial from investment banking, and applying antitrust laws to the remaining five biggest Wall Street banks so none is "too big to fail." At the same time, environmental legislation is now slinking its way through Congress. The Waxman-Markey climate bill was passed by the House in June; John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have now released a Senate version. All four legislators claim to be progressives concerned about the environment, but the bills are, frankly, far short of what's needed. Waxman-Markey gives away 85 percent of pollution permits to the nation's biggest polluters, and the "cap" it proposes on overall carbon emissions would cut greenhouse gas emissions only by an estimated 2 to 4 percent by 2020 compared to the UN reference year of 1990. (If America was to play its appropriate role in a global climate deal, the reduction would be more like 40 percent, and the U.S. would also provide financing and technology so developing countries could reduce their emissions by a comparable amount.) The Kerry-Boxer bill has a stronger cap on emissions but it's still far short of what's necessary -- and it leaves out the hardest part, which is the actual cap-and-trade mechanism. Kerry and Boxer are leaving that to the Senate Finance Committee, of all places. And what's happening on the jobs front? Find out, and more, after the jump. --Robert Reich
