With Reid's Support Wyden And Baucus To Cosponsor 'Free Choice' Amendment

If only.

The amendment is a good step in the right direction, but the PO should be open to anyone to buy into. Not just those making 400% of the poverty line and below. It (the PO) should also be open to employers to buy into for their employees. That would be a huge cost saver and vastly expand the size of the PO pool. Getting business that are not in the health industry out of the healthcare business (GM was basically a health insurance provider that happened to make cars) would be huge. It would be a massive shot in the arm to American businesses to be able to effectively move healthcare costs off their books and make them competitive once again in the global market because unlike companies in every other industrial country, they would not be shouldering healthcare costs on their books.

though, usually a bigger pool in the exchanges is good for the exchange, and a bigger pool of healthy people in the PO reduces costs overall, according to previous CBO scores.

Increased subsidies, that's my guess what the arguement would be. Though govt takeover is most likely.

I think Congress would have to amend ERISA (not a bad idea, BTW) for employers to be able to give different benefits to some employees.

Worth noting, Lieberman actually is a previous cosponsor of Wyden's bill! Surely Lieberman would not vote against his own interests and stated positions just to be inexplicably difficult, right?

*laughs, then cries*

None of the GOP'ers will support the cloture vote on the amendment, not the amendment if it gets by cloture. Wyden's amendment is DOA and we all know it.

Baucus is simply co-sponsoring it to play nice for killing it off in Committee. That was the moment of risk: if it passed Baucus's committee, it's something that Dodd and Harkin would have agreed to in Merger, and then it would have taken 60 votes to strip it *out*. Now it's 60 to put it in, and we know that there will take only 1 Dem to kill it.

Dead. Wyden knows it, but wants his vote. One suspects that he wants people to take stand on it to use in the future. But I think we all know that means little.

John

I think there may be some confusion about the use of the word "subsidy" here. What the press release says is:

The agreed to amendment will make it possible for these individuals to convert their tax-free employer health subsidies into vouchers that they can use to choose a health insurance plan in the new health insurance exchanges.

I interpret this as meaning either that the "subsidized" insurance is employer-subsidized insurance (this was my previous impression of how the Wyden bill worked, that the employer is required on demand to take the money they were going to use to buy you insurance and just hand you a voucher for 75% of that amount, or something)-- or else if I'm confused and there actually are some government subsidies involved, the vouchers are at least deficit-neutral because they are paid for using something that otherwise would have been a tax credit to your employer. I guess one would have to read the actual bill to be sure.