This is good news, because the Baucus-Grassley version was a $80 billion bipartisan boondoggle that was packed with tax breaks and did very little that would actually, you know, create jobs:

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday that his chamber would move quickly to pass four popular provisions aimed at creating jobs, potentially with the bipartisan backing that has proven elusive in recent months.

The provisions were plucked from a broader package of business incentives and unemployment aid negotiated by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and his GOP counterpart, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa). But instead of advancing the bigger bill, Reid announced that he would break it into two parts, bringing the jobs-related incentives to a vote on Feb. 22. The remaining measures would move later as a separate bill.

"We feel that the American people need a message," Reid told reporters Thursday. "The message that they need is that we're doing something about jobs."

All the fast-tracked provisions have bipartisan support, but GOP senators were caught off-guard by Reid's bifurcated strategy, announced just as Republicans were releasing statements in praise of the larger bill. Senior Democratic aides said Reid made the move to quell squabbling among Democrats about the contents of the larger bill amid rising criticism that the legislation included too many special-interest perks.

Queen Olympia has decided that the very thing that would make insurance exchanges work is the thing that has to go. And you know when the queen speaks, the Senate listens! (Do you ever get the impression that the Queen is actually wearing no clothes?)

Olympia Snowe looks set to reprise her role in hobbling the stimulus bill in exchange for providing the key pivotal vote for it by killing John Kerry’s amendment, “Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers.” Jon Cohn explains:

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a “prudent purchaser.” In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums — and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

There are several problems with this. One is that it’s going to be a mess for consumers. Another is that it threatens to turn the exchanges into playgrounds of implicit risk-shifting efforts wherein companies try to design policies specifically around dissuading high-need people from signing up. Thus ever-more burden is going to be placed on the untested risk-adjustment machinery that’s supposed to even this all out. Ezra Klein observes that Jon Kingsdale is basically the only person in America’s who’s run anything like the exchanges envisioned in all the different bills—he does the job in Massachusetts—and he views the prudent purchaser rule as absolutely essential. Against that Snowe is pitting, I guess, her intuition that this is too much government involvement.

TNR's Jonathan Cohn lays out his argument here:

The bills moving through Congress all set up exchanges modeled more or less on what Massachusetts has done. But there are a few critical differences. Among the most important is a difference in how the exchanges would select which plans to offer people.

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a "prudent purchaser." In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums--and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

Jon Kingsdale, who runs the Massachusetts exchange, calls that a recipe for "policy disaster," as consumers faced a dizzying array of more expensive, less regulated choices. "It would be like telling your grocery store they have to offer every single kind of bread baked by every single bakery. ... The exchanges would be nothing more than an automated Yellow Pages."

Kingsdale is among several Massachusetts-based policy experts who have been ringing the alarm bells about this flaw in the Finance bill. And it's no coincidence that it's a Massachusetts senator, Kerry, who now proposed to fix it by giving the exchanges the same powers envisioned in the House and HELP bills.

But when Kerry introduced his plan last week, he couldn't get the votes to pass it. The reason, several sources on Capitol Hill say, was opposition from Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who also sits on Senate Finance. Snowe seems to be concerned that a more aggressive exchange would amount to more government--which, in fact, it would be. But, as Massachusetts has shown, sometimes more government is exactly what health care needs.

Chances are reasonably good that Kerry's vision of reform will prevail, if not during the Senate floor debate then afterwards, when a conference committee merges whatever passes from the two congressional chambers. But it's not a sure thing, which is why this seemingly narrow question deserves a lot more attention.

Exchange design doesn't get the attention of controversies like the public option, abortion, or supposed death panels. In the long run, though, it could be far more decisive in whether reform works.

I wish I wasn't all hoped out these days, because then maybe I could see this news as a push for the public option on its merits, an actual solution and not as a campaign of CYA for the Democratic brand, something in which anything remotely resembling a "public option" will be good enough for their purposes - i.e. convincing supporters this actually is a representative democracy.

I suppose we'll see:

WASHINGTON - -- Despite months of seeming ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched an intensifying behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea in the weeks just ahead.

President Barack Obama has long advocated a so-called public option, while at the same time repeatedly expressing openness to other ways to offer consumers a potentially more affordable alternative to health plans sold by private insurers.

But now, senior administration officials are holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to bring to the Senate floor later this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides.

Among those regularly in the meetings are Obama's top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, aides to Reid, and Senate finance and health committee staff, both of which developed health care bills.

At the same time, Obama has been reaching out personally to rank-and-file Senate Democrats, telephoning more than a dozen lawmakers in the last week to press the case for action.

Administration officials are also distributing talking points and employing other campaign-style devices to rally support for passing a bill this fall.

The White House initiative, unfolding largely out of public view, follows months in which the president appeared to defer to senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill as they labored to put together gargantuan health care bills.

It also marks a critical test of Obama's command of the inside game in Washington in which deals are struck behind closed doors and wavering lawmakers are cajoled and pressured into supporting major legislation.

"The challenge is to go to the (Senate) floor, hold the deal," said Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist who was chief of staff to former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. But "they are more involved than people think. They have a plan and a strategy, and they know what they want to get and they work with people to get it."

DOWNLOADS: (1561)

PLAYS: (2131)

Embed

All day I've been hearing how stupid Max Baucus was to release his plan this week which is basically the same bill he leaked back in June. Chuck Todd was wondering why he took so long to produce nothing new. Suddenly the lead Baucus Dogs' bill isn't the be all and end all.

Todd and Andrea Mitchell were saying that Baucus still has a role, but he screwed up by taking so long. He lost his leverage. We'll see, but it was fascinating watching the media turn on the the king of the gang of six.

And now it appears that Liz Fowler has her hand in the Senate Finance bill.

Max Baucus' plan had the name of Liz Fowler, a former WellPoint VP who now works for the Finance Committee, in the metadata. When you have WellPoint personnel instrumental in writing the laws, you get little provisions like this:

Interstate Sale of Insurance. Starting in 2015, states may form “health care choice compacts” to allow for the purchase of non-group health insurance across state lines. Such compacts may exist between two or more states. Once compacts have been formed, insurers would be allowed to sell policies in any state participating in the compact. Insurers selling policies through a compact would only be subject to the laws and regulations of the state where the policy is written or issued.

This is something that conservatives have been begging to do for years. Even the most outgunned conservative on a talking head debate can vomit up "let people take their insurance across state lines to increase competition!" It sounds reasonable. But there's a very good reason why it would quickly turn into a nightmare, and you can see it in the examples of Delaware and South Dakota.

{}

Consumer Watchdog jumped on this today, claiming that this race to the bottom could be expanded...read on

Now Baucus is saying he'll go it alone without Republican support. So why was there a delay if that's the case? Grassley has been acting like an ass the whole time.

Max Baucus is getting serious. Just a few hours before President Obama is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress, the Finance Committee chairman announced that the committee would be moving forward with a health care reform bill - with or without the GOP.

The announcement followed a morning meeting with the so-called Gang of Six. A source with knowledge of the situation said that Baucus told the two other Democrats and three Republicans that he will be putting out a "Chairman's Mark" by the middle of next week whether he has Republican support or not. (A Chairman's Mark is a bill written by the chairman of the committee.)

Amanda Marcotte understands what's happening. I only wish the media would do their job.

It’s obvious that people who show up screaming about how they want the government out of their Medicare and who go into a faint because they heard that the health care bill has no provision to ban abortion aren’t people that you can respond to in any way. They can’t compromise or understand the concept. They’re too busy struggling against reality itself.

{}

It’s the people who are putting corporate profits ahead of human lives who need to explain themselves. They’re the ones who should be asked why corporate profits count more than lives. They’re the ones who should be asked why working class citizens should be forced to decide between paying for an insurance bill or paying their rent in order to make sure that no insurance company executive goes without a fresh supply of yachts and fancy cars. They should be forced to explain why insurance company executive yachts count more than your ability to avoid homelessness, or your ability to have a perfectly treatable illness actually treated.

Nothing makes the Republicans happier than making sure regular people like us have as few rights as possible, and their obsession with "tort reform" is part of that campaign.

Remember, I used to investigate incompetent and crooked docs for a living. There are more of them out there than most people will ever know, and they cause real damage to people's lives - and it's often expensive damage. So the same Republicans who want to take away your legal right to sue to cover your care don't even pretend they want you to get the needed medical treatment, either.

And if Olympia Snowe has her way, the Democrats will roll over your legal rights in their eagerness to get a bipartisan deal on the healthcare reform bill.

ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports: Republicans have long pushed for limits on malpractice lawsuits – what advocates call malpractice reform. It’s a central element of any Republican health care plan. But to Democrats and their trial lawyer supporters, the idea has been a non-starter.

Now, it seems, malpractice reform may be back in play.

The reason: Olympia Snowe, the sole Republican Senator who seems inclined to support Democrats on health care reform, wants it.

Snowe told me today she likes the proposal put forward by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus. “There’s a lot of promising elements in it,” she said. “It’s a work in progress.” When I asked what she wants changed, she said she’d like to see it include malpractice reform, which she called critical to controlling health care costs.

To Democrats malpractice reform may be too a steep price to pay, but Snowe right now may be the only way Democrats get the 60 votes they need in the Senate.

More Republican hypocrisy, of course. Just look at the states that have instituted the Republican version of tort reform, like Texas. Health care costs (and malpractice premiums) went up, not down. Queen Olympia knows this - she's just holding all the cards in this bipartisan poker game.

And they're playing with our lives.

Just another example of Her Royal Attitude:

On Wednesday afternoon, Olympia Snowe told MSNBC's David Shuster and Tamron Hall that she has personally asked President Obama to remove any mentions of the public option from his speech to Congress.

Snowe said she wanted the president to take the public option "off the table" because doing so "would allay the concerns of so many of whether or not there's a government takeover." Snowe added, "The point is, I don't support a public option, and none of my Republican colleagues do."

And you know what? I'll bet you she gets her way. (But hoping to be proved wrong!)