In an article in the Hill, Baucus is seen as the one in the driver seat. Although he had a head start in healthcare reform, he is dragging his feet. Baucus is nonplussed about the pressure to get a bill out of his committee because he believes that bipartisanship is the best way of doing things:
Baucus seemed to have a solid head start on healthcare reform when the year began. He'd spent much of last year holding hearings and public events featuring experts and lawmakers to build the foundation for a push he expected to happen if Barack Obama won the White House.
He and his staff compiled exhaustive lists of policy options and put them out for public scrutiny. Baucus began working collectively and individually with members of his committee in both parties and went all-out in the breakfast briefing circuit.
It was beginning to look like his panel would be first out of the gate with a healthcare reform bill -- and that he'd be able to bring along Grassley and other Republicans to boot, giving Baucus some serious leverage as the legislative process moved forward.
Things haven't quite worked out that way. Despite the fact that Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) has been absent all year fighting brain cancer, his panel moved its bill out of committee while Baucus, Grassley and their small cadre of negotiators continue to say little more than "We're ready when we're ready."
Meanwhile, though the House is currently mired in Democratic infighting over its version of healthcare reform, Democratic leaders in that chamber also dropped their bill and pushed it through two out of three committees. They, too, await Baucus as centrist members don't want to vote for the House bill's big tax increase until they see whether the Senate will devise something more palatable to their constituents.
All the while, there's Baucus and his band of senators, alternately known as the "coalition of the willing," the "gang of six" and the "gang of seven" (before Sen. Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] pulled out). They'll be ready when they're ready.
This article makes Max Baucus look like an even bigger jerk than I thought. The comment we'll be ready when we're ready reeks of elitism. It's up there with "let them eat cake." There are millions of Americans without insurance. Small businesses are struggling to keep healthcare coverage for their workers. This jerk has the nerve to slow walk the process because he doesn't want a public plan. Instead he wants to subsidize the insurance companies and make things worse. Moreover the way the negotiations have so far been conducted have been done in anti-democratic fashion where there is little transparency. I have to say that Baucus and his merry band of senators are really out of touch. They really think that we are stupid, but they will learn otherwise. This is a sad day for this country.