Dean Baker: What's So Scary About Offering People the Option of a Public Health Plan?

[marmar]

What's So Scary About Offering People the Option of a Public Health Plan?

By Dean Baker, AlterNet. Posted July 8, 2009.

If the public plan is bad, then people will just stay with the options currently available in the private sector.




Independence Day is a time to reflect on the United States and to ask what it is that we really value about our country. Most people would probably list the freedoms that it has usually guaranteed to most members of society. The opportunities for economic success, while not as great as often touted, are nonetheless impressive.

However, some members of Congress were apparently celebrating our system of employer-provided health insurance last weekend. Or, at least that is what they want us to believe.

As Congress starts to delve into the dirt of a health care reform package, the clearest point of conflict is over the existence and structure of a public health care plan. Some members of Congress have thrown down the gauntlet, insisting that they could never allow the public to have the option of buying into a government-run plan.

These members tell us that a government-run plan will be like having the post office manage our health care. While the post office actually does a pretty good job where I live, if the point is that a government-run plan is going to be bureaucratic and inefficient, then why are opponents of a public plan so worried about giving people the choice to buy into it? If the public plan is bad, then people will just stay with the options currently available in the private sector. As those of who believe in the free markets like to say: "what's wrong with giving people a choice?"

In addition to the members who just say "no" when it comes to a public plan, there are also members who are willing to allow a public plan, but only if they can be sure that it will not provide real competition with existing private plans. This route involves crippling the public plan in various ways to make it less competitive. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141160/what%27s_so_scary_about_offering_people_the_option_of_a_public_health_plan_/

[napi21]

1. If YOU were making a couple of mill. a year YOU wouldn't want

some competition taking it away from you either! THAT'S the biggest fighting point! Too many people are making way too much money in the private system and sure don't want to lose it!

[MadAsHell]

2. Baker asks a fine question

and exposes the silliness of the arguments against.

It's either - A) the government is incompetent to manage health care - or B)the government is too good at managing health care which will cause the insurance companies to die and free market system will collapse without choices.

It can't be both. Why isn't anyone in congress pointing this out to these yahoos?