Health insurance companies are allowed to suck cash directly from the treasury under the Baucus mark-up and HR 3200. Stupid.

I guess former CBO director Peter Orszag now also backs the new Conrad CBO Standard. He must share the belief that whatever the CBO determines is incredibly important unless they disagree with Senator Kent Conrad.

Atop the front page of The New York Times today is a color photo of Georgia homes flooded up to their rafters, an image that illustrates how when it comes to insurance our Congress applies two standards, separate and unequal, one for property and a lesser one for people.

Unlike people without health insurance, homeowners have access to public option flood insurance.

I wonder which of Beck’s “9 Principles, 12 Values” this would fall under.

Mike is right –  this is a transparent attempt to kill the public option, and no progressive organization should be helping them. 

World leaders from Hu Jintao to Barack Obama have pledged to take action on global climate change. But there seems to be little faith that an agreement of substance will be reached in Copenhagen later this year. So what are the politics of global climate change? And what’s at stake? Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya on the UN deliberations and what can be expected at the climate summit

In a stunning moment during the Senate Finance Committee markup Sen. Tom Carper defended a secret deal that the White House, Baucus, and PhRMA had reached. The White House has long denied the deal. Carper publicly acknowledges that part of the deal was that PhRMA would run millions of dollars worth of campaign ads in support of health care reform.

According to Carper the “golden rule” in Congress is that secret back room deals in exchange for advertising buys must be honored.

Back in mid June, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Administration’s long promised new policy on state secrets use would be revealed “within days”. Over three months later, and on the eve of oral argument in the most critical case, and most dangerous to the government unfettered use of state secrets, the Administration has conveniently leaked word that its new policy will be released.

A New York Times analysis compares government contributions to Congressional health insurance premiums with the government contributions under the Baucus plan. We should all be working for the government.

Mmmmm-mmmm, fresh sausage!

Senate liberals are insisting on generous subsidies for private insurance coverage and a “public option” of government-run insurance. Conservatives, fearful of rising government costs and new federal programs, prefer private insurance cooperatives.

Each compromise Baucus makes with liberals is likely to add to the roughly $800 billion the legislation will cost over 10 years, undermining the deficit reduction that is its chief selling point.