The Coming Health Care Bill CramDown

Get ready for the bum's rush!

Max Baucus' grossly misrepresented and lied-about Senate Finance Committee health care bill is reported to be voted out of committee on Tuesday.

If you are like me, you are curious as to why a health care bill is being written in the Senate Finance Committee. Doesn't the Senate have some sort of health and social welfare committee where this pig should have been born?

As it happens, by the way, Fox News reported this past week that the Senate has only two committees which, as a matter of operating principle, never publish full bills to the full Senate prior to votes.

Guess what one of them is? That's right- the Finance Committee.

You cannot make this stuff up.

So the bill goes out of committee this week. I suppose it rattles around on the floor for "debate" for several days, prior to the Democrats holding their noses and cramming the bill through with only 51 votes under "reconciliation" rules, although those rules are supposed to apply to budget bills, not national social policy omnibus bills with pages numbering in the thousands.

Then, after some time during which the House will pass some disgusting, larded-up pig of a health care bill of its own, the two chambers' representatives meet for the all-important "reconciliation" process.

This is a different process than the Senate's fly-by-night voting rules which overturn its traditional requirement of 60 votes for passage.

My question is this. The House Democrats have made clear that some provisions in the Senate version will be DOA. Among them, for example, is the tax on so-called "gold plated," or "Cadillac" health care plans, many of which belong to union members.

I hope the public and Republicans insist on a CBO rescoring of this new pig-in-a-poke. You can bet that what Baucus has been cheering about for his bill, a so-called, alleged "deficit neutral" scoring over a decade, by dint of carefully backloading benefits and front-loading taxes, will become a net deficit creator, along with a huge spending kick.

If the Democrats hang their collective hats on the CBO scoring, let's all see what happens when the Democratic pigs in the House get their snouts in the trough on this one.

You can bet that the scoring will result in a bill so far from any sort of spending neutrality that there'll be no way of disguising it as the Democrats try to cram it down voters' throats.