But if you lose your job or have a medical emergency, you're on your own

Mo' money, mo' money, mo'money! At what point do we stop pouring money into the black hole that is AIG?

The Bush administration was overhauling its rescue of the American International Group on Sunday night, according to people involved in the deal, amid signs that the interest on its current credit line of more than $100 billion was putting too much strain on the ailing insurer.

The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve were near a deal to abandon the initial bailout plan and invest another $40 billion in the company, these people said. The government created an $85 billion emergency credit line in September to keep A.I.G. from toppling and added $38 billion more in early October when it became clear that the original amount was not enough.

When the restructured deal is complete, taxpayers will have invested and lent a total of $150 billion to A.I.G., the most the government has ever directed to a single private enterprise. It is a stark reversal of the government’s assurance that its earlier moves had stabilized A.I.G.

The revised deal, which may be announced as early as Monday morning, is likely to intensify the debate in Washington over why some companies should be saved by the government while others are left to wither.

The money would come from the $700 billion that Congress authorized the Treasury to use to shore up financial companies. Just this weekend, Democratic leaders in Congress called on the Bush administration to drop its opposition to using some of that money to rescue Detroit automakers.

The government’s original emergency line of credit, while saving A.I.G. from bankruptcy for a time, now appears to have accelerated the company’s problems. That short-term loan came with a high interest rate — about 14 percent — which forced the company into a fire sale of its assets and reduced its ability to pay back the loan, putting its future in jeopardy.

The new deal would make the government a long-term investor in A.I.G., something that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had said he hoped to avoid. As part of the revamping, the government would lower the loan amount to $60 billion from $85 billion, lengthen the payment schedule to five years from two years, and lower the interest rate.

They broke it, YOU bought it. That is the Republican free market doctrine for you. I wonder what all the people who qualified for prime mortgages but were baited-and-switched into subprime by their lenders, and who now find themselves about to lose their homes, feel about the ranting by Republican politicians about "personal responsibility"? I wonder how all the people who have lost their jobs and who will lose their jobs in the next six months because of AIG feel about the fact that it took Andrew Cuomo freezing bonus payments to the very executives that ran this company into the ground to get them to realize that it wouldn't look good to be shoveling billions of dollars into the pockets of the incompetent and the greedy.

I sure hope that Barack Obama's economic team is thinking about what they're going to do with the Audrey II that is AIG and at what point they're going to pull the plug on this dying company.