We deserve better than TRIGGERS. We deserve real reform. No weaseling.

[nashville_brook]

BY TIM FOLEY
CATEGORIES: OBAMA AND CONGRESS, PUBLIC PLAN
PUBLISHED MAY 30, 2009 @ 08:01PM PT

How do you water down competition that’s specifically designed to address a major flaw in the current marketplace? Now we come to “the fallback plan” or trigger option. An idea being floated by Sen. Olympia Snow and flat-out embarrassingly supported by Sen. Ron Wyden (who has publicly said he’s open to a public plan) would create a “trigger.” Health care would happen this year, but the public plan would not. As Pear explains, “the public plan would be created only if private insurance companies had not made meaningful, affordable coverage available to all Americans within several years." All of these terms – “meaningful,” “affordable” and “several years” – are as vague as can be. The trigger may be set up so, in effect, it never happens, similar to the Medicare Part D trigger that would have created a public prescription drug plan – but never did. The threshold would be low enough that it could be easily, and superficially, met. Throughout those “several years,” the insurance plans would receive all of the uninsured who enroll through a National Health Exchange, pocketing what we can hope are generous government subsidies, with very few changes to their behavior. And even if the trigger is met and a public plan created years down the road, private insurance would have serious “status quo bias” on its side. It’s one thing to be given a choice between public and private when you don’t have anything, something else entirely to actively switch your plan (although it should be noted that 21% of private Medicare Advantage plan holders choose to leave for the safe haven of public Medicare). So let me get this straight: for the sake of having a big, feel-good compromise in the Senate Finance Committee, we’d be willing to take the word of an insurance industry that has made record-breaking profits on the basis of cherry-picking, denying care, and setting up tilted, monopolized playing fields such that 94% of the health insurance markets in this country are deemed “non-competitive” that they can clean up a mess that currently makes them rich without a competitor to, in the words of the president, “keep them honest”?

Guns don’t kill good policy – trigger mechanisms in the Finance Committee do.

I sincerely doubt that the public plan will be the only point of disagreement between these two committees. We haven’t even scratched the surface of controversial issues still waiting to erupt, from physician compensation to employer mandates to tax policy. This is merely the one that makes the best lead for a news-article, since both pro-reform and anti-reform third parties have made the public competitor the focal point of their respective arguments.

But, as Howard Dean has said about the public plan, “we'll be back fighting for another twenty years before somebody tries again.”


http://healthcare.change.org/blog/view/the_public_health_insurance_option_trigger-happy

[bluethruandthru]

1. A trigger is bull shit!

It's like telling the insurance companies "We're gonna be real mad if you don't start playing nice one of these days".
Why would anyone think this is a good idea??
We have a health care crisis NOW! Why can't we fix it NOW??

[Laelth]

2. A trigger is not good enough.

No "robust" public option = no deal.

Anything less is just a bail-out of the health insurance industry.

:dem:

-Laelth

[LostInAnomie]

3. There is no way around it, the triggers amount to giving up.

Even if we were to make them strict, and even if we were to actually enforce them (instead of creating creative ways to get around them), as soon as we would pull the trigger, the debate would start all over.

It wouldn't be as simple as saying "We set up standards and the insurance companies didn't live up to them." It would be an endless fight to decide if the insurance companies actually failed. Then, we would give them another chance. Then, when they fuck us over again (if we don't give them another chance) it will turn into another health care war like we are having now. Finally, someone will propose another bill that will "reform health care" again by further giving in to insurance companies.

It will be an endless cycle.

[Joe the Liberal]

4. A "trigger" is a fucking joke.....

this country is a joke, if that's what we end getting then there probably won't be another shot at REAL reform for a very long time. I will be deeply disappointed if that's all that comes out of this debate, I still have hope that we will at least get a public option. I don't think Obama will let us down but we'll see what happens.

[jtrockville]

5. We're supposed to take the WORD of the insurance industry?

How much is a liar's word worth?