Think twice when you hear the words 'public option' health insurance

[BeckyDem]

By Ed Weisbart, M.D.
St. Louis Post Dispatch, July 5, 2019

Shhh! Don’t tell the insurance companies (it’s a secret).

That’s the logic of the presidential candidates who are pushing a “public option,” also known as Medicare for Those Who Want It. They claim that adding a Medicare-like option onto the health insurance marketplace is an easier political lift than real Medicare for All, and that such an option would thrive in the free market and open the door for Medicare for All. Then the insurance industry would admit defeat and quietly ride off into the sunset, finally achieving what should have been done in the first place.

The fact that the insurance industry is lobbying hard for this circuitous incremental approach should tell you all you need to know.

Sadly, many of us don’t understand the choice we’re being offered. That helps them sell the idea that having more options is always better. It’s true that we need free choice of doctors and hospitals, but insurance should disappear into the background. That’s what would happen with Medicare for All; that’s not what would happen with a public option, and the difference is all-important.

We could spend the next few years passing a public option and then wait several more years to see how it works. Ten years later, we would still be playing catch-up with the rest of the industrialized world, where health care costs half of what it does here in America and yet produces dramatically better results.

Why isn’t a public option good enough?


First, it’s missing nearly all the savings of a single-payer system. Health care insurance companies operate at 15% to 20% overhead; Medicare’s overhead is 2%. We will never reach Medicare’s efficiency by keeping today’s complex insurance industry in the mix. Never. Plus, the insurance companies’ inefficiency — as high as it is — is dwarfed by the untold time and money patients, doctors and hospitals waste in dealing with those companies.

https://pnhp.org/news/think-twice-when-you-hear-the-words-public-option-health-insurance/

[democratisphere]

1. Single payer is the ONLY WAY to go as it takes the wall street

criminal investors out of the healthcare equation.

[BeckyDem]

2. All the candidates know what you said to be true.

[qazplm135]

3. And it will never pass

Because you are selling a theory people don't all believe.

The public option PROVES the theory for those folks and makes the transition more likely.

Pushing we want it all now is going to set the path back.

[democratisphere]

4. Sometimes choices become easier when the greedmongering healthcare system

bankrupts itself and the country. The current system is not financially sustainable; fix it now with single payer or wait for the entire current system to go Armageddon.

[qazplm135]

5. Or ya know

Fix it in a few years, everything isn't do it now or everything collapses.

[democratisphere]

6. Forever can't kick the can down the road.

[qazplm135]

7. no one said anything about forever

but M4A isn't passing in 2020 or 2021...so you have two choices...

Say it's M4A or nothing...and get nothing.

or.

Say, Public Option now, M4A after and you will get M4A because people will CHOOSE it and see that it's not all of the bogeymen they've been told it is.

[Martin Eden]

8. About half the US population is covered by employer-based health insurance

Though far from perfect, these policies for the most part provide good health care.

Tens of millions of voters would be very hesitant to have that coverage taken away, to be replaced with a new Medicare for All system. The rightwing Fear and Propaganda factory would go into overdrive, which could have a very negative affect for Democrats in the 2010.

The reason for the "Public Option" as a first step is entirely political, deemed necessary (by many who advocate it) for winning the election.

[Marcuse]

9. The insurance corporations will not go gently into the night.

The bookies fought government off track betting. The numbers bankers fought government lotteries. The insurance lobby is in a much better position to buy off the government.