Nevermind...they fucked this all up, too...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...LmRI_blog.html
(From James Capretta, former associate director of the OMB)
“It’s a terrible, terrible plan. It will hand the president a huge strategic victory and deliver nothing that the GOP should be seeking in this fight. It’s far, far worse than anything we have seen thus far, and certainly much worse than the McConnell plan.”
So what is in it? Capretta revealed:
It’s essentially a call for a budget “reconciliation” bill, with no specifics yet available. Senate committees with jurisdiction over taxes and entitlements would be tasked with achieving targeted amounts of savings or tax increases. For instance, the Finance Committee would be charged with reporting out a tax-reform plan that increases taxes by about $2.3 trillion over a decade. That committee would also be charged with finding savings in Medicare and Medicaid, but there’s absolutely no indication of how the savings will be achieved.
Republicans would be foolish to think this process will produce anything worthwhile. The Democrats control the Senate, and all of the committees. They will write the tax and entitlement changes, and look for Republican votes. It’s a recipe for another round of useless mishmash posing as “entitlement reform.” Remember, Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus is an architect of Obamacare. If his committee were to produce any real health-care savings at all, it would be with the same kind of price-setting and central planning that was written into Obamacare. There’s zero chance this process will lead to any meaningful movement away from the Obamacare model.