Max Baucus, the head of the Senate Finance Committee, has explicitly and publicly said that universal Medicare was never considered as a possible health care reform option. When the committee held hearings on reform, no one supporting universal Medicare was allowed to testify, even though this is the only health reform option that has any sort of grassroots support. There are reasons why universal Medicare would be difficult to pass politically, but the Washington Post's description of Baucus's approach to reform: "his approach has been to pull together stakeholders and hold them as long as possible; no idea is ruled out, no policy change dismissed," is simply not true. Since Baucus has not been willing to consider universal Medicare and it is incredibly bad reporting for the Post to tell readers, in a major front page story, that "no idea is been ruled out" when this is clearly not true.
--Dean Baker
