Max Baucus (D-MT) has finally decided to let us all know that he's formulated his health care plan:

In a last effort to give the Senate a bipartisan health care bill, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee circulated a comprehensive proposal on Sunday to overhaul the health care system and proposed a new fee on insurance companies to help pay for coverage of the uninsured. The proposal is the culmination of more than a year of work by the chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. A similar fee was proposed by several liberal Democrats in July. In making it part of his proposal, Mr. Baucus may help cover the costs of the bill but also risks alienating Republicans whom he is trying to win over. Mr. Baucus is struggling to forge a bipartisan consensus among 6 of the 23 senators on his committee before President Obama puts new pressure on lawmakers in an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening. The proposal by Mr. Baucus does not include a public option, or a government-run insurance plan, to compete with private insurers, as many Democrats want.

Mr. Baucus’s plan, expected to cost $850 billion to $900 billion over 10 years, would tax insurance companies on their most expensive health care policies. The hope is that employers would buy cheaper, less generous coverage for employees, thereby reducing the overuse of medical services. The separate new fee on insurance companies would help raise money to pay for the plan. The fee would raise $6 billion a year starting in 2010, and it would be allocated among insurance companies according to their market shares.

No public option. Not even a public option with a "trigger," which was a ridiculous idea tacked on to a position that was already a compromise. And the central tenet of the financing: a giant new "fee" that insurers are already saying they'll simply pass on to their customers.

Apparently I'm supposed to be more favorably disposed toward the "fee," because it was once proposed by liberal Senators like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). And I'll admit that the sentiments expressed by those two have some merit:

Mr. Schumer said, "The health insurance industry should pay its fair share of the cost because it stands to gain over 40 million new consumers under health care reform legislation." Mr. Rockefeller said the fees were justified because insurance companies were "rapaciously, greedily and unstoppably making money by underpaying the patient, by underpaying the provider and by overpaying themselves."

But if the idea of health care reform was to control the growth of premiums, that's not really gonna help. And I understand that healt care reform options like those I'd prefer -- single payer or a non-profit, publicly-funded alternative -- will also cost taxpayers money out of pocket. But I'd rather spend that money funding a provider that won't be motivated to deny me coverage in order to increase bonuses for its employees. That's my bottom line. The fee gets passed on to the customers just as surely as any increase in taxes required to fund a public plan would, but at least if it's a tax for funding a non-profit entity, nobody's taking 30% off the top for bonuses.

Anyway, the real tragedy here is that this falling-off-a-log plan is "the culmination of more than a year of work" by Baucus. A year ago, we knew the Republicans would oppose single payer. We knew they would oppose any kind of public plan, because they oppose any expansion of government that they didn't author or that doesn't kill foreigners or wiretap hippies, and because they would even oppose all of that if Obama would get a "win" if it passed. And we probably could have guessed that they would have opposed these fees, too (and they do), but would be more than happy to see Democrats add them into their plan, because it's such a loser, at least so long as people don't have anywhere else to go that allows them to buy insurance without facilitating yet another skimming opportunity for the insurance companies. A fee might work just fine if there was some way to avoid having to carry that burden for the insurance giants.

So what I'm saying here is that it's very disappointing, to put it as mildly as possible, that it took Baucus more than a year to formulate a plan that amounts to capitulating to every Republican demand, and then adding a heaping pile of political suicide on top of it. Thanks, Max! Great plan. Glad we waited.

Now STFU.