Righting the record on the Affordable Care Act

by George Ochenski, Washington State Standard
December 16, 2025

With the Affordable Care Act subsidies on the chopping block in the Republican-controlled Congress, it’s no surprise the Lee newspapers did an interview with Montana’s former senator Max Baucus.  As the chairman of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee, Baucus “was chief architect of the Affordable Care Act known as “Obamacare.”

According to Baucus: “For 15 months, I had the committee work on health care, and it was totally nonpolitical. I had several rules. One is if anybody gets political, I’m cutting them off at the knees. We’re trying to address something here, honestly. Second, if anybody has a problem, they’ve got to bring a solution. Third, nothing is off the table. We’re going to consider everything.”

It’s not unusual for politicians to attempt to rewrite history to smooth over the blemishes and polish the successes.  That’s what politicians generally do.  A couple great examples, “the 2020 election was stolen” and on Jan. 6, 2021 the mob that stormed Congress and sent Representatives and Senators fleeing for their lives were merely “tourists.”

To be kind, perhaps at Baucus’ age of 84 some details of the past aren’t quite remembered correctly. And things definitely look different from Washington, D.C., than they do here in Montana.  But the fact is, Baucus’ rendition of history is lacking some very significant details about the formulation of Obamacare, namely what got considered and what did not, and who did the considering.

Many of the Montanans who were actively involved in attempting to provide their input to Baucus have passed on, including Eric Feaver, who was the head of Montana’s largest union at the time and who would certainly dispute Baucus’ claim that “nothing is off the table, we’re going to consider everything” when it came to formulating the legislation.

The fact is Feaver, and the union he led as well as unions nationwide and thousands of Montanans, did not support Baucus’ plan to stick the insurance industry squarely between patients and their health care providers.  What they did support wholeheartedly was a single-payer system – which did not include the rapacious health insurance industry and assured citizens they would be covered for their treatments by a single public system without ever-rising premiums, co-pays and out-of-pocket costs.  Baucus, however, said single payer was “off the table.”

Make no mistake, Feaver, his union members, and hundreds of Montanans didn’t just send emails or phone calls to Baucus’ office, they demonstrated all over the state, gave speeches, and marched en masse to his Helena office to protest his plan and support single payer —not just once, but many times, including once when the large crowd arrived to find the doors to Baucus’ Helena office locked in mid-day presumably because Baucus didn’t want to hear what they had to say.

In the meantime, back in D.C., Baucus had hired Liz Fowler, a former insurance industry executive, as his chief health counsel on the Finance Committee.  As noted in an interesting interview with Fowler, she admits that President Obama did not support Baucus’ mandate that individuals must purchase health insurance.  Unfortunately, Obama got the same reception we Montanans got — and the bill included the insurance mandate, putting the insurance industry firmly in charge of Americans’ health care.

Were it not for that mandate, the current concern over millions of citizens losing their health coverage because Congress won’t extend the subsidies wouldn’t exist.

Moreover, Democrats controlled majorities in both chambers of Congress and had Obama in the White House.  They didn’t need to appease Republicans and they could have passed real health care, not increasingly expensive health insurance in the misnamed “Affordable Care Act” — which isn’t affordable.

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