Insurance industry bites hand that feeds it as finance committee votes on health care bill

Whoops. I've been so busy getting ready to write a novel next month that I started to lose track of the health care debate.

When last we visited this debate, three House Committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had already voted on some version of a health care bill. Now it's the turn of the Senate Finance Committee, which is scheduled to vote today.

The Finance Committee is chaired by Montana Senator Mike Baucus, who is variously described as a moderate Democrat or an insurance industry toady, depending on who is doing the describing. Baucus's goal has been to create a "moderate" bill that Republicans and the for-profit healthcare industry can support. For Baucus, the key to gaining that support has been not to have even a very watered-down version of a public option -- a government-run plan that would compete with private insurers.

The problem is, the Finance Committee bill--like the other bills making their way through Congress--requires almost everyone to purchase health care insurance, and without a public option, that could be a very expensive purchase. According to National Public Radio, in order to address this issue,

Last-minute changes made subsidies more generous and softened the penalties for those who don't comply with a proposed new mandate for everyone to buy insurance. The latter change drew the ire of the health insurance industry, which said that without a strong and enforceable requirement not enough people would get insured, and premiums would jump for everyone else.

AMERICAblog points out the irony of the insurance industry attacking the Baucus bill, and in another post, links to this video of  New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner explaining how the insurance industry's opposition to the Baucus bill makes the case for a public option: