There's a simple fix for Obamacare's current woes: the public option

[KamaAina]

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12520820/public-option-health-care-obamacare

This week, Aetna announced it would stop selling insurance plans in all but four Obamacare exchanges, the state-run markets set up under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Aetna, which now covers more than 800,000 people in 15 exchanges, said it had been hemorrhaging money on the plans. (A fight with the government over an acquisition of the insurance company Humana may have played a role, too.)

Aetna’s exit, following similar departures by UnitedHealth and Humana, means that a growing number of US counties — 20 to 25 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — now have only a single private insurer offering coverage on the exchanges, a development that essentially eliminates consumer choice. One county in Arizona now has no insurers. Even before Aetna’s decision, more than half of state exchanges had four or fewer insurers, with DC, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island having only two.

It’s enough to make a frazzled health care consumer in one of those feeble markets wish there were another option — perhaps even (dare one say it?) a public option. Does the phrase ring a bell? That’s the health care policy that some policymakers pushed to include in the 2010 law....

Since the early 2000s, I had been calling for letting the public sector compete with private insurers to sign up people younger than 65: not "Medicare for all," a dream of the left for decades, but "Medicare for more," a public insurance plan for working-age people that could compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to push back against drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, hospital systems, and other health care providers.

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. We already have at least one public option.

Medicare. Expand for everyone. There is also a health care delivery system for the armed forces. I would think that either one could be expanded.

This is not rocket science. But the insurance companies would have you believe that it is impossible. I think it's time to cut them loose.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

3. My experiences with military health care delivery

is that it sucks, or it did when we used it. We paid out of pocket for supplemental insurance for years so that our daughters could see civilian doctors, and even then, it was a pain because Tricare took so long to pay their part.

I use Tricare standard now as a supplemental to my good insurance (BC/BS), and they still suck at paying in a timely manner.

[SammyWinstonJack]

4. And allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and also eliminate the coverage gap, aka, donut hole.

[mike_c]

2. I hope I live long enough...

...to dance on the grave of the private health care insurance industry in the U.S., the blood sucking parasites who monetize disease and injury to line the pockets of their executives.