As a clear sign that the administration is ready to cave to the insurance industry, check out the recent apologia for industry profits at the Center for American Progress, which is intimately allied with the Obama White House.
Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias writes about Max Baucus’s emerging health-care proposal:
This Baucusverse is, I would say, better for me than the current reality. It’s also better for CareFirst. CareFirst is basically getting a new customer. So good for them. But I’m also getting a new health insurer, so good for me.
Increasingly, we’re seeing liberal health-care “reformers” lining up behind this Baucus plan, which is written, in effect, by major health insurer WellPoint, and which will spell huge profits for the insurers.
If you believed the Democratic rhetoric to date, this is surprising. Isn’t health-care reform a crusade against “well-funded forces” and cynics profiting from the status quo? Well, no, not at all, as I discuss in my column today.
This moment in the health-care reform debate shows just how corporate welfare happens: Big Government forces rally behind proposals to curb the excesses of Big Business, Congress gets ahold of the proposals, lobbyists get ahold of Congress, and what comes out the rear end is a Big Business-Big Government collusion that crushes smaller competitors, leads to higher taxes, and typically raises costs.
[update: PhRMA (warily) applauds BaucusCare.]
