Montana Sen. Max Baucus unveiled his long-awaited legislation Wednesday aimed at overhauling the American health care-system. It appears he will struggle to get any Republicans to support the bill, which wasn’t altogether unexpected.
But one of the loudest critics of the plan to emerge is Baucus’ Democratic and Finance Committee colleague Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who slammed both the legislation and the process in which it was reached. From POLITICO:
“I’m not very happy about that obviously,” Rockefeller said of the process. “I think it was predictable that the bipartisan thing was not going to work. And we spent virtually an entire year with most of the Finance Committee being excluded, and a lot of us have a long history in health care and have very strong ideas and good ideas.”
From Talking Points Memo:
Rockefeller, who says he regards the public option as a “must,” writes, “there has been no significant research into consumer co-ops as a model for the broad expansion of health insurance. What we do know, however, is that this model was tried in the early part of the 20th century and largely failed.“