Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who is arguably the prime author of the Affordable Care Act, is “very concerned” that implementation of it is not going well. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Baucus repeatedly expressed concerns that the administration has completely failed to do proper outreach and [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the first congressional leader to pick his three members for Catfood Commission II. From Politico: In the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Max Baucus [...]

In the last few days, several bloggers – among them Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein — have written faulty defenses of the health care bill. They used theoretical, counterfactual alternatives in defense of the health care legislation they’ve supported, calling to mind Voltaire’s classic, Candide. In it, Voltaire heavily mocks the extreme optimism of Pangloss, [...]

The media are finally waking up to the fact that the temporary high-risk pools created by the new health-care law were completely unfunded. Only $5 billion was set aside for the program, which is probably less than a third of what would be required to keep the program funded until 2014. This should not be [...]

Reuters reports that WellPoint is under federal investigation for singling out breast cancer patients and dropping their coverage “based on either erroneous or flimsy information.”  They also report that language in the House bill would have protected these women, but it was removed in the Senate version of the bill because “lobbyists for WellPoint and [...]

Federal investigators have told Reuters that WellPoint, the country’s largest insurance company, is using an algorithm to target women with breast cancer for the express purpose of dropping their coverage. Murray Waas writes that WellPoint “specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies”: None of the women [...]

Not a surprise really that upon passage of the health care bill, Max Baucus would openly thank Liz Fowler, the former Wellpoint VP, for writing it: Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, there are a flood of emotions going through all of us today as we pass this reconciliation bill which improves upon the bill the President [...]

The Obama administration, in its push to get the House to vote for the Senate’s health care reform bill unchanged, is pointing to the serious issue of lack of competition in the health insurance market as a powerful reason for reform. Obama’s health care proposal, however, no longer does much to actually solve the problem. [...]

One sure sign that the Senate health care bill is dead as a doornail is the inevitable appearance of the anonymously-sourced finger-pointing articles. And in a novel twist, we have one blaming Rahm for the failure to pass health care reform that appear to be written by Rahm:

With the loss of their 60th vote in the Senate, Democrats are going to need to find a new way to pass health care reform. The most popular idea is for the House to pass the Senate bill as is with many important “fixes” passed just before or at effectively the exact same moment using [...]