“Folks in Montana and across the nation are struggling to find jobs in this tough economy, and every day these benefits are lapsed is another day Americans worry how they will feed their families while they look for work,” Baucus said in a press release. “I urge my colleagues to stand with us to support American families and restore the unemployment insurance benefits that are often the only lifeline many workers have in this tough economy.”

Reid filed for cloture last night, and is working with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to move the bill today, though Republicans have repeatedly objected to any measure that increases the deficit.

The new bill extends federal unemployment insurance benefits through Nov. 2010, and the closing period for qualification for the homebuyer tax credit to Sept. 30. It is technically a substitute amendment to the killed jobs legislation. Here is a summary of what’s in the bill:

Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

Unemployment benefits: Restarts the emergency unemployment compensation program phased out at the end of May 2010. The program provides up to 53 weeks of extended benefits, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. The measure is retroactive — meaning that Americans who have lost their unemployment checks will be compensated — and goes through November.

Further extended benefits: Restarts funding for further tiers of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks.

Eliminates the penalty for part-time workers collecting unemployment benefits: Gives states the option to let UI claimants keep certain benefits if switching to state benefits would reduce their weekly UI check by at least $100 or 25 percent.

These three provisions cost $33.9 billion over ten years.

Extends the closing date for the homebuyer tax credit: Homebuyers need to have purchased a house by April 30, 2010. Now, they need to close by Oct. 1, not July 1, 2010. The provision is estimated to cost $140 million over ten years.

Change to the Travel Promotion Act (TPA): The Department of Homeland Security was due to fund the Travel Promotion Board by the end of the year. This delays that funding start by a year. This change saves $95 million over ten years.

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Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Needless to say, the government and tax payers and American health care consumers would save a lot more than $80 billion over the next ten years if the government turned its back on the deal and committed to reining in prices and cutting into drug company profits. So who will the lawmakers champion, the companies or the people? Republicans know where they stand. The battle is being waged between House Democratic leaders and Senate Democratic leaders. Senate Democratic leaders have shown zero willingness this year to break the agreement with Big Pharma.

Yet, Senate Democratic leaders vowed this week to close the nettlesome coverage gap in Medicare drug benefit and won praise from seniors.

“I am committed to fully closing it, once and for all,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday. “We will do so in our conference committee with the House, whose bill already closes the gap.”

But how will Reid and company do that without fracturing the Big Pharma deal?

Fearing the industry’s opposition to the underlying reform bill, Senate Democrats, behind Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), have already shot down several proposals in recent weeks that would have broken the deal — including legislation making it easier for Americans to buy their prescription drugs from abroad, as well as the very provision that the House used to close the doughnut hole.

That means that Democrats, if they intend to keep that deal intact, will be forced to find additional money to close the doughnut hole — estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the federal government more than $42 billion over the next decade. That’s no simple task for Democratic leaders who have already struggled to find offsets for legislation tickling $900 billion. So far, they’re giving no clues how they might do it.

“It’s something that we will have to deal with in conference,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley wrote in an email this week.

Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a long-time champion of the controversial offset provision, echoed that uncertainty Tuesday. With the Senate bill not yet finalized, she said, it’s too early to begin speculating about conference specifics.

The doughnut hole has been controversial since Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, called Part D, was rammed through Congress by the Republican majority in 2003. Under that benefit, the government pays 75 percent of seniors’ drug costs up to $2,700, when patients must begin paying full price. After those expenses hit $6,154, the government picks up 95 percent of the tab, meaning the doughnut hole is $3,054.

The gap has created serious health concerns. Indeed, in 2007 roughly 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries reached the doughnut hole, of which about 15 percent stopped taking their prescriptions as a result, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As part of their $80 billion deal, drug makers agreed to cover half the cost of name-brand drugs for seniors stuck in the doughnut hole, beginning in 2010. The House bill builds on that foundation, cutting the doughnut hole by an additional $500 per person in 2010, and incrementally shrinking the gap further until 2019, when it would close altogether.

The controversy is not over the proposal itself, but how it’s funded.

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Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., at the President's joint-session address on health reform, 9 Sept. 2009 (WDCpix)

The Senate’s markup of the bill begins Tuesday.

“We understood that undocumented immigrants would get no taxpayer subsidy, and that there would be a verification system,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., in a conference call last week organized by the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice. “We said ‘okay.’ Bitter pills were swallowed,” said Gutierrez, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But soon after Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., publicly called President Obama a liar, said Gutierrez, “the White House started saying that illegal immigrants cannot even purchase health care on the free market health care exchange.”

After Obama in his September 9 speech said that under his health care plan, everyone “will be required to carry basic health insurance”, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that President Obama had never meant to allow illegal immigrants to participate in the health care exchange included as part of the proposal.

Gutierrez recalled that he was the first member of the Hispanic Congressional caucus to support Barack Obama for president, and “we galvanized the whole community to support him.” Obama had promised to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows” and provide “a path to legalization,” Gutierrez recalled. “That’s the president I voted for. Not one that said you can’t have health care even if you can pay for it.” Now, he added: “We’re revisiting support for health care reform.”

Latino religious leaders have similarly expressed their disappointment with Democrats who they’d previously supported and warn that they risk losing Latino support if the final bill, being worked out this week, ends up penalizing immigrants.

“Senate Democrats with the apparent support of the White House have rushed to deny undocumented immigrants the chance to use even their own money to pay for private health care,” said Rev. Luis Cortez, president of Esperanza, the largest evangelical Latino organization in the country, on the conference call last week. “We are seeing a demonizing of immigrant people,” he said, adding: “The political price is going to be high for both parties.”

“We were hopeful that the Democratic party which controls the Senate, and controls the House, and controls the executive wing was going to bring sanity to the conversation about immigration and comprehensive immigration reform,” he said. “If this is the beginning of the conversation, all we can look at as Hispanic people . . . is to look at every election and try to punish every individual regardless of their political party who denies rights to legal immigrants as well as who tries to punish those who are the poorest and most defenseless people in the country.”

In addition to the ban on illegal immigrants ability to participate in the health care exchange, immigrants’ advocates and Latino leaders worry that there’s little discussion of ending the current 5-year ban on even legal immigrants’ access to Medicaid and other health benefits. Although Sens. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., have all either sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to eliminate the five-year waiting period, such proposals do not seem to be winning much support.

On the contrary, the outline of the bill released last week also suggested that there might be “a two-year waiting period for any affordability credits for legal immigrants,” said Eric Rodriguez, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, last week. Meanwhile, legal immigrants in households where some members are not documented will have only limited access to benefits. “We’ve got to change the way this debate is unfolding,” Rodriguez said.

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Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), WDCpix

As conservatives continue to warn that the Democrats’ health reform plans would stick government bureaucrats between doctors and patients, a number of consumers, physicians and former insurance industry employees told lawmakers Wednesday that such bureaucrats are already in place: they’re called private insurance companies. And, bound to shareholders above patients, the witnesses said, these companies are playing a sometimes-deadly game of withholding payments for doctor-prescribed services simply to inflate profits.

“The status quo for most Americans is that health insurance bureaucrats stand between them and their doctors right now, and maximizing profit is the mandate that has simply overtaken this industry,” Wendell Potter, former head of communications at insurance giant CIGNA, said during a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on domestic policy, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). “The bureaucracy of private health insurance is a labyrinth of deliberately misleading terms of art designed to help companies minimize the coverage provided and maximize profits to appease Wall Street and investors.”

That status quo, according to many lawmakers, medical experts and consumer groups, provides plenty of reason for Congress to create a non-profit, government-backed health insurance plan to compete with the private companies. Such a public option, Potter argued, is “absolutely vital” in order to protect patients from the “duplicitous” practices of the insurance industry.

Kucinich agrees, arguing that “private health insurance bureaucrats play with the lives of people … when they are at their most vulnerable.”

The comments arrive on the same day that the Senate Finance Committee, led by Montana Democrat Max Baucus, unveiled a long-awaited proposal to overhaul the nation’s dysfunctional health care system — a plan that excludes the public option in favor of non-profit health cooperatives. The co-op model was chosen in an effort to lure the support of Republicans, notably Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Finance Committee, who has said repeatedly that the public option would create a system of government bureaucrats “infringing on the doctor-patient relationship.”

The Baucus bill, however, faces a tough road ahead. Not only are conservatives blasting away at the bill as an expansion of government that will steal services and choices from patients, but liberals are railing against the absence of a public plan to keep insurance companies honest.

Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.V.), who chairs the Finance Committee’s health subpanel, told reporters Tuesday that there’s “no way” he’ll vote for the Baucus bill as it stands. He pointed to tales of insurance companies denying claims and dropping patients over trivialities — like customers failing to include acne as a prior condition — as reason for lawmakers to push hard for the public option.

“It sounds impossible,” Rockefeller said of the industry’s strategy, “but it happens on a routine basis.”

Linda Peeno provided further testimony that the routine is real. A former review physician for Humana, Peeno said she was evaluated — and rewarded financially — based on claims denials and other tactics that would save the company money. Private insurers, she said, even go so far as to hire outside companies to draft proprietarily protected coverage criteria whose “basic purpose is to deny or limit care.”

“This has never been a more deadly time for patients,” Peeno said.

Conservatives tend not to agree. Micheal Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, told lawmakers Wednesday that the private insurance industry represents a “marvel” of the free market working to benefit consumers. “Health insurance harnesses the self interest of millions of strangers to produce an unquestionably compassionate result,” Cannon said.

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Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) (WDCpix)

Unlike the Republicans, who adopted the strong conservative position of resisting almost every Democratic reform proposal from the start, Democratic leaders ruled out the liberal single-payer proposal early in the debate. Now in search of a centrist compromise, GOP leaders have plenty of room to maneuver, while Democrats are left facing proposals that either dilute the public option or eliminate it outright. Indeed, the Senate Finance Committee is expected on Tuesday to unveil long-awaited reform legislating promoting the creation of private health cooperatives, not a public plan.

For many health reform and patient advocates, the developments have been a disappointment. After gaining both the White House and large majorities in Congress this year, the Democrats have made comprehensive health reform their top domestic priority. On the campaign trail last year, then-Sen. Obama came out in enthusiastic support of a strong public insurance option to compete with private insurers as a way to control premium costs, which are skyrocketing. In Congress, Democratic leaders in both chambers also gave clear endorsements to the public option. Even conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who chairs the Senate Finance panel, promoted such of plan in a November 2008 policy paper detailing his “vision for health care reform.”

Republicans have adamantly opposed such a plan. But they’ve also had the advantage of knowing for months that Democrats wouldn’t push for anything more liberal. In August of 2008, for example, Obama said that the best option for health reform might indeed be single payer — which would eliminate private insurers in favor of government-backed, Medicare-style insurance designed to provide universal coverage. But he also conceded that it would be too difficult to launch quickly.

“People don’t have time to wait,” he said.

In May, the White House’s top health official told lawmakers that single payer coverage “is not something that the president supports.”

In the House, Democratic leaders held just one hearing this year on single payer, almost as an afterthought. And Baucus, for his part, ignored single-payer supporters until June, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the only upper-chamber lawmaker to support single-payer health care, set up a meeting between advocates and the Finance chairman.

The message to Republicans was clear: Single-payer health care would be off the table from the start.

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Described as “a framework of a plan for consideration” by the Gang of Six, the plan proposes to tax private insurers for high-cost plans (an idea that’s anathema to the insurance industry and many Republicans), but would also create regional non-profit health care cooperatives in lieu of a public plan — a win for the industry, which is fighting tooth and nail to kill House legislation that pushes the public option. Stay tuned….

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Sen. Max Baucus (D), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has received $3 million from the health and insurance industries between 2003 and 2008, Eggen reported, with less than 10 percent of the haul coming from his home state of Montana.

Baucus, a six-term moderate with a history of working closely with the Republicans on the panel, is currently crafting legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system. A central sticking point remains whether to include the option of a public plan — a central component of the Democrats’ strategy, but a nonstarter with almost all Republicans. Baucus is hoping to find some happy medium that satisfies everyone. He’ll have no trouble recognizing what would make the biggest health industries happy.

Top out-of-state corporate contributors included Schering-Plough, New York Life Insurance, Amgen, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield; individual executives such as Richard T. Clark, chief executive and president of drugmaker Merck, have also made regular donations. Most of these companies, particularly major insurers, strongly oppose a public insurance option, which is favored by President Obama and top House Democrats but has not received support from Baucus’s committee.

Aides for Baucus told The Post that the Finance chairman stopped accepting contributions from health care PACs after June 1 to eliminate the appearance of conflicts of interest. But he’s not doing a very good job following through. On June 15, according to the Federal Election Commission, Baucus accepted $5,000 from the Schering Plough Corporate Better Government Fund.