Baucus's Trojan horse. Will Hagan bite?

Senator Max Baucus released a health care bill from the Senate Finance Committee yesterday for which North Carolina's Democratic senator Kay Hagan offered her partial support.

The Baucus bill is a gift to insurance companies disguised as health care reform. Let us hope Hagan recognizes this.

Matt Taibbi explains the principles reflected in the Baucus bill:

Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the "individual mandate" is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry.