Does nobody remember that when it comes to the ACA...

[BumRushDaShow]

20. Don't forget this guy -

which is why the ACA-PPA is the way it is.

Here is an interesting running commentary series on his role during that year of crafting and drafting the ACA, from the prospective of Baucus' Senate Finance Committee (just ONE of at least 6 committees working on the bill), that directly controlled the "financial" aspects of the Senate versions (NOT the House versions) of the ACA - https://archives.cjr.org/campaign_desk/baucus_watch_archive.php

Specifically here is where single-payer was torpedoed by him - https://archives.cjr.org/campaign_desk/baucus_watch_part_ix.php

Baucus Watch, Part IX
The senator ejects single-payer advocates—again
By Trudy Lieberman, CJR
May 13, 2009


Single-payer advocates tried again yesterday to be heard at another Senate Finance Committee hearing on health reform options. Again, chairman Max Baucus indicated he didn’t want them there. The topic of this hearing was how to pay for reform, and the witness list included various organizations with strong views (or expertise) on the subject, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the AFL-CIO, and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Michael Jacobson, the long-time executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, whose specialty is food and nutrition, was also there. Maybe Jacobson was invited for diversity.

Single-payer proponents had asked that Dr. Marica Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of a popular book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, or Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of the Physicians for a National Health Program be allowed to speak. Advocates had also tried to get New York Sen. Charles Schumer to help them, but it appears things didn’t work out politically.

The Washington Times reported that several protestors stood up and shouted such slogans as “no more blue crosses and double crosses.” Like last week, protesting the exclusion of single-payer supporters from the table was apparently too indecorous a thing for the Senate, so Baucus had five demonstrators removed from the hearing room. They were arrested in the hallway. As the meeting came to order, twenty-five nurses dressed in red hospital scrubs stood in silence, with their backs turned to the chairman, and left the room. The Times noted that the audience applauded.

Baucus had this to say:

Believe me, we hear you. I will meet with anyone who wants to meet. We’ve got to work with what we’ve got. We cannot go to a single payer system, but that’s not going to work in this country.

More: https://archives.cjr.org/campaign_desk/baucus_watch_part_ix.php

I spent over a full year following the ACA on CSPAN, CSPAN2, and CSPAN3 (all of which showed the various hearings going on simultaneously in both chambers - at least 6 of them). Each committee would offer their draft legislation and the idiot media would suddenly jump up and pick out a single committee's version and declare that ONE committee's draft mark-up was "THE BILL", as if that single committee's draft was the final version.



What had to happen at the end of this initial process was that they had to create a Joint Committee to consolidate and reconcile the House and Senate versions and then bring that back to their respective chambers to vote on and that is what happened in December to get something "on the books".

In the spring of 2010, because Democrats no longer had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they were able to use the tool of "Reconciliation" to craft the final budget piece that had not been included in the original ACA, and this involved the Senate taking a bill that had already passed the House, because that is the only way the Senate can proffer a bill that involved money (the House MUST "originate" these because they have the "power of the purse" ). And in this case, they used a bill that involved Student aid, and tacked on the healthcare budget outline to it, to create the "Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010", which was signed in March 2010 as an amendment to the Affordable Care Act passed the previous December.