Senator Max Baucus released his long awaited health care bill proposal today.  The reception that the bill got had to have been disappointing for the senator.  Republicans and liberal Democrats alike have roundly derided the bill.  Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-WV) announced yesterday (before the details of the bill were even announced) that he would not vote for the bill because it imposed a "a big, big tax" on middle class workers in his state.  A local lefty blogger Tweeted that the bill was "DOA" while Republican bloggers are saying this just shows that Democrats are not interested in a true "bi-partisan" approach.  While I agree with my Republican friends that this is a bad bill, you can not deny that it is a vast improvement to HB3200.  Gone (from this bill) are the provisions that will allow public funding of abortion.  Added were ID check provisions that say that illegals can not get access to public funded health insurance.  The public option HAS been replaced with co-ops.  In fact the Baucus bill seems to carry many of the provisions of another Senate bill, one that Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is co-sponsoring - the Healthy Americans Act.

One of the provisions in the Healthy American Act that has conservatives up in arms is the individual mandate that says you will buy health insurance or the government will fine you up to $3200 a year (the Baucus bills penalty is much, much higher)...and you thought health insurance premiums were expensive.  The Washington Examiner opined that the individual mandate was an anathema to conservatism for two reasons.....

An individual mandate should be anathema to all GOPers for two reasons. First, the individual mandate is the fulcrum of cooperation between government-run health care advocates and the big health insurance companies that would profit immensely if it's approved. As the Social Security Institute's Larry Hunter trenchantly observed, the big insurers "desperately want an individual mandate passed and will accept anything short of having their CEOs pushed out of an airplane door to get it." Such a "public-private partnership" will work no better for health care than it has in the mortgage industry with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Second, the approach makes a mockery of individual freedom of choice because it forces everybody to buy a government-approved health insurance plan from a government-approved insurer with oversight by government bureaucrats.

Other conservatives argue that individual mandates  may not be Constitutional.

The Baucus Bill can be found here and I will be going through the bill as time permits for a more in depth analysis, but I do find the individual mandate to be probably the most troubling part of this bill.  We have long been told that you "can not legislate morality".  Well you can not legislate responsibility either.  For as much as all states have mandatory automobile insurance (which is legal as you are driving on public roads) laws, we still hear daily about accidents caused by uninsured drivers.  The individual mandate is next to impossible to enforce.

One big difference between the Baucus bill and the Healthy Americans Act is that at least the Baucus bill does not provide coverage for illegal immigrants.  The Healthy Americans Act would cover illegal immigrants.

Neither  bill touches torte reform and inter-state portability.  Those are two items that have to be addressed if the country is EVER going to get medical costs under control.

The fact that Bob Bennett has supported these "reforms" when they were in the form of the Healthy Americans Act should make conservatives in Utah look twice at supporting him for re-election.