Max Pain

Man, I'm sure that immediately after releasing a health care reform proposal that would pretty much guarantee he'd continue getting his pockets lined by insurance lobby cash, Max Baucus figured he would have a good day ahead of him.

Financially, maybe. PR-wise, not quite.

First up, it's been revealed that before the White House received Baucus's sell-out to the private insurance industry -- K Street got a copy. This morning, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called the fact that special interests were contacted by Baucus before anyone else "not surprising." As Cesca alludes to, this is basically just a nicer way of the White House calling Baucus an ethically compromised douche.

But it gets better.

Anyone with a brain figured from the beginning that the insurance industry was essentially going to be ghost writing the Baucus plan. As it turns out, though, the people who thought that were wrong: An insurance insider actually wrote the plan outright. Liz Fowler is Baucus's senior counsel; she also happens to be a former VP at private health insurance giant Wellpoint (parent company of Blue Cross) -- and as it turns out, her name was accidentally left on the Baucus document, in the properties dialogue box, as its author.

During her tenure at Wellpoint, this happened:

"Blue Cross of California [parent company: Wellpoint] 'routinely' violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such 'harsh' treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industrywide.

State regulators plan similar investigations of other health plans in California, and the findings against Blue Cross ratchet up the risk of liability for other insurers, many of whom face lawsuits from consumers who claim they were illegally dumped and subjected to substantial hardships.

As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday said that it had fined Blue Cross $1 million -- an amount immediately criticized by canceled policyholders and consumer advocates as too small to matter to an insurer whose parent company, WellPoint Inc., earned $3.1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $57 billion."

So, yeah. We should definitely give a crap what Max Baucus and his office want to see happen with health care reform in this country

(h/t Cesca)