Although Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) met as agreed with advocates of Single-Payer Healthcare“>met as agreed with advocates of Single-Payer Healthcare yesterday, his stance on including single-payer the healthcare reform discussions remains unchanged. His basic argument is, “now that I’ve kept you from the table, gosh and dolly-gee, it’s just too darn late to include you now.

Senator Max Baucus met Wednesday with advocates for single-payer healthcare, including Senator Bernie Sanders, and told them that he might drop criminal charges against 13 people arrested
for speaking up in his hearings, but that he would not include any supporters of single-payer health coverage in any future hearings. According to one report, Baucus suggested that he’d been mistaken to
exclude single-payer but asserted that the process of creating healthcare reform legislation was too far along now to correct that omission.

Senator Sanders said after the meeting that if healthcare reform did not create a single-payer system it shouldn’t be done at all, and that within three or four years we would realize we’d solved nothing. He
said that it would be better to increase funding for community health centers and take steps to make it easier for medical students to go into primary care, than to enact major reforms that didn’t go to the
root of the problem.

It should be noted that a clear majority of doctors, nurses, and that most insignificant of constituencies, We the People, favor single-payer. So, in summary, we have both the best healthcare and best government that money can buy.

On the bright side, the NY State Senate adopted a resolution yesterday calling for Congress to enact Single-Payer, and for the NY Congressional delegation to support John Conyers’ HR 676. Of course, in reality, that’s about as binding as a stern memo from Pat Leahy to Karl Rove, telling him he’s really, really mad that Rove ignored his subpoena. But, whatever.

In other NY State news, our very own Governor Blinky Paterson vetoed legislation that would continue to allow NYS cops and firefighters to retire with a full pension after 20 years. Yeah, go after those horrible cops and firefighters, Governor. Just ‘cuz they managed to survive 20 years on the job doesn’t mean they deserve a pension.

One more step on the way to our next Republican governor. Unless Andy Cuomo runs and defeats Blinky in the primary, I see no way Paterson gets re-elected. The fact is, in NYS, a Democrat who has labor, the Public Employees unions, cops, and firefighters all lined up against him just aint gonna win. Period.

Oh well, off to my cushy State job.