Baucus plan DOA?

Boy, talk about a mess. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, through his bipartisan Gang of Six, has managed to come up with a 10-year, $856 billion bill that all sides are finding fault with. There's no public option in this package - not a big surprise because Baucus had tried to reach across the aisles - but as a consequence the liberal wing is up in arms. And the really bad part, at least based on the initial critiques, is the squeeze on the middle class. Henry J. Aaron, a senior fellow in economic studies at The Brookings Institution, sums it up nicely in the NYT's Room for Debate:

The fundamental challenge is simple: extending health insurance to everyone is expensive. Meeting the president's prudent commitment not to sign any bill that would boost the deficit requires sizable tax increases or spending cuts to pay the subsidies necessary to make insurance affordable for low- and moderate income households. How generous coverage should be depends on how much taxes can be increased or spending cut.

Well, raising taxes within that middle income swath is a non-starter. Thing is, the price tag has never been outlandish - $90 billion to $100 billion a year to make sure everyone has health care coverage doesn't seem crazy high, especially compared with some of the bailout numbers we've seen over the past year. Much of this, of course, is a psych-out by Republicans; I mean, many of us spend over $1,000 a year on coffee at Starbucks, which on its face seems ludicrous ($10,000 over a 10-year period). You can make any price tag look high. But, so what? Columnist David Corn has this take:

With the Baucus plan, a family of four making $66,000 would have to pay $700 a month for government-mandated health insurance coverage. That's more than many people at that income level are used to paying now for whatever health care coverage they have. For a good number of households, this could be a rather weighty obligation. What's happening is that Baucus, looking to satisfy a handful of Republicans and perhaps a few moderate Democrats, is trying to make the Senate bill ($880 billion over ten years) cheaper than the more generous House bill (more than $1 trillion). But to do that he has to push more of the cost on to middle-class families. Yet how are those families going to feel about this?

For all that, Baucus has yet to win the support of a single Republican. Makes you wonder why they wouldn't just go back to Plan A, with a public option and all the rest. From Nate Silver:

Some of this is Baucus's chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus's reform plans -- not "leaks", not trial balloons -- points toward a defective process.

Like I said, a true mess.