It’s hard to think of anything scarier than the healthcare bill that the House left dangling in committee in July. Unless it’s the new, revised version of the healthcare bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hopes to rush to the House floor for a mid-October vote.

That’s because, according to CBS News’s Political Hotsheet (drawing on a story in Roll Call), Pelosi hopes to make the revised bill even more liberal than it was in its three original versions..

Here’s the story:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is planning to include in the bill a tax on wealthy Americans, as well as a more robust government-run health insurance plan (or “public option”), abandoning the compromises leaders in a key committee worked out with the moderate Blue Dog Democrats, according to Roll Call.

The original tri-committee health care bill introduced in the House would have raised taxes by 5.4 percent on taxpayers making more than $1 million a year, but some Democrats have opposed the measure.

The original House bill also included a public option that moderates in the House Energy and Commerce Committee made less robust. The Blue Dogs in the committee worked out a deal with committee leaders to make a public option negotiate payment rates with medical providers — instead of dictating them. This is intended to put a public option on a “level playing field” with private insurers. Pelosi, however, reportedly plans to peg public option payment rates to Medicare payment rates.

In other words, Pelosi wants to:

* Raise taxes even higher.

* Drive private insurance companies out of business even faster–and make the practice of medicine even less attractive to would-be physicians–by keeping the cost of the public option artificially low.

Sweet.

Finder’s fee: Drudge