Usually, when Max Baucus tries to craft a grand bargain, oversized legislation starts by getting progressively worse, at which point the legislation finally dies. But he has finally succeeded in getting a grand bargain, with a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance in exchange for votes on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade deals. Baucus [...]

Remember Liz Fowler? The former WellPoint VP whom William Ockham noted was the literal author of the health care reform bill? I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to learn that WellPoint’s former VP will be in charge of consumer issues and oversight as our country implements the WellPoint/Liz Fowler health insurance bill. (h/t Glenn Greenwald) Liz [...]

Max Baucus’ then State Director and now girlfriend, Melodee Hanes, helped arrange Baucus’ separation from his then-wife in 2007.

Max Baucus takes a walk on the wild side, shags his aide, fluffs her with government perks and hilarity ensues.

This is delectible politics. Fresh off a meeting with Ob-Rahma, Jay Rock has come back to the Senate and demanded 90% loss ratio for any coverage the subsidies pay for. That means the insurance companies can’t steal 20% of our tax dollars to pay for executive salaries. They get 10%.

They’re peeing their pants right now.

Thing is, this amendment will never ever pass.

The MaxTax is largely a Medicare bill attached to 39 pages of private health care reform. To show you what I mean by that, here’s roughly how many pages MaxTax spends on each topic:

Health care exchange and other means to make private care available to the uninsured: 39 pages (including several on preventing tax dollars from being spent on undocumented workers or abortions)

Extending access to the poor and underserved (including expanding

Ceci Connolly says her Pay2Play pals in the health care industry love Max’s bill.

Here’s a scary part of MaxTax, if I understand it correctly. MaxTax still screws employees but rewards Wal-Mart as I’ve laid out in this post and this post. In addition, though, MaxTax imposes much higher standards for affordability on employees who have access to health care through an employer.

The Senate is talking about something I talked about last week: how unaffordable the MaxTax is for the middle class.

As it stands, the MaxTax might work out to a billion dollar reward to Wal-Mart for paying its workers such crappy wages.