Max Baucus: “To be honest, I think if all Members of the Senate were like the Senator from Maine, we would have an agreement. The…”

“To be honest, I think if all Members of the Senate were like the Senator from Maine, we would have an agreement. The Senator well knows there are a lot of other Senators in this body who were dug in and who very much wanted their points of view. We had the last meeting. We were working on five issues: Assets test, benefit design, Medicare reforms, consumer protections, and how to design a viable fallback mechanism, which would take effect in the event of private plans not entering a particular market. Roughly speaking, we were working off the basis of the so-called tripartisan view, but is it not also true at that time that was very loose and there were an awful lot of issues to work out?”