(Promoted by lancesteagall - NYTimes is not, unfortunately, the pinko rag that the conservatives paint it as (chomp. crunch.))

The New York Times has done some excellent reporting lately, particulary by David Leonhardt, on the health care reform debates. Sunday’s half-page editorial summary of the bills and issues was also excellent.

So unless this article is meant to mock Baucus’ nightmare team, it is bewildering that the Times would allow itself to be used by the Senate Finance Committee to cover for the continuing failure of the "coalition of the unwilling" to produce a proposal that isn’t an insult to the millions of Americans waiting for real reforms.

Instead of simply telling us that the Committee failed yet again to confront the problem, the Times gives us a leaked puff piece on how hard the six Senators have been working in secret not to reform America’s broken health system. And by gosh, they serve great snacks:

Last week, there were chippers — chocolate-covered potato chips — described on a sign as “North Dakota Diet Food.” More often, there are Doritos, pretzels, Oreo cookies and beef jerky: fuel to get through hours of talks on topics like the actuarial values of private insurance plans or the cost-sharing provisions of Medicare.

That’s just swell. The group’s leaks to the media have the Committee bragging about ideas that will make fewer people eligible for Medicaid, or how much money we can save by reducing subsidies to those who can’t afford health insurance, and why they don’t want an employer mandate, even though they’re designing one weaker than the House bill’s.

But maybe they’ll have the courage to tax those "Cadillac" insurance policies, because that won’t amount to much but it will look good and it will save us from having to impose a surtax on the wealthiest 1 percent to whom we’ve given so much and from whom so little is expected.

How many thousands will lose their insurance this week? But Olympia Snow and friends have bravely confronted that by insisting there will be no public plan to challenge a rogue industry that stays solvent through federal Medicare Advantage subsidies and committing fraud on people who think they’re covered until they get sick.

But who cares? When you’ve got chocolate-covered potato chips, it doesn’t matter that the proposals you’re leaking as a trial balloon just to pretend you’re working and not stalling would give the most inefficient, costly and cruel health insurance system in the modern world a larger guaranteed market with no effective competition. Chomp. Crunch.

This map shows that most areas of the country have only 1 or 2 dominant insurers locally, so wasn’t it clever of Grassley to come up with a vague, undefined co-op proposal that isn’t portable and can’t possibly challenge the mega insurers, just to say we like non-profits? Give the man an Oreo!

Yeah, we have lots of small rural electric co-ops, but have these people never seen Warren Buffett’s map of the giant private utilities that surround them and control the transmission? The co-ops survive by Congressional protection, and they get open access in regions that offer a strong quasi-public power pool open to everyone?

Thousands of people will lose health coverage this week. "Pass the Doritos, Max, and what if we make another two million people ineligible for Medicaid? It’ll get a great CBO score." Slurp.

[Updated Tuesday a.m.]