Does The Public Option Lead To Something Better?

Michael Moore in the latest Rolling Stone:

If a true public option is enacted – and Obama knows this – it will eventually bring about a single-payer system, because the profit-making insurance companies won’t be able to compete with a government plan and make the profits that they want to make.

Mikey gives Obama too much credit throughout the article. Everything coming out of the White House and Congress indicates that the ‘public option’ will be a severely handicapped one – you can thank bipartisan compromise and that $1.4 million a day in insurance company lobbying for that. Significantly, Obama’s recent mention of the US Postal Service during a town meeting on healthcare portends a far more likely future for the ‘public option’ than leading to single-payer.

The option to purchase a public plan within a market of private health insurance plans would merely provide one more player in our inefficient, dysfunctional, fragmented, multi-payer system of financing health care, that is if the public option even survives the political process. It would leave in place the deficiencies that have resulted in very high costs with the poorest health care value of all nations (i.e., overpriced mediocrity in health care).

Those who believe that the people of this nation would have the wisdom to drop their private plans and join the government program are ignoring history. When Congress authorized private plans to compete with our existing public program, Medicare, many enrollees did just the opposite. One-fifth have left the traditional Medicare program and joined the private plans.

So why should we care? Why shouldn’t they have the right to choose private plans if they want them? We know that those private plans are wasting money, both in their own costs and the administrative burden they place on the delivery system, but what all too many don’t realize is that we are all paying for that waste because of the inherent structural deficiencies in our financing system. Plus we are being deprived of the reforms needed in our health care delivery system that our own single payer monopsony would bring us.

Further reading: Comparing single-payer with the ‘public option’
And for those confused between single-payer and OMFGOSH SOCIALISM…

Martin Feldstein, Harvard professor, talking about stuff he doesn’t understand

Obama has said that he would favor a British-style “single payer” system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried but that he recognizes that such a shift would be too disruptive to the health-care industry. The Obama plan to have a government insurance provider that can undercut the premiums charged by private insurers would undoubtedly speed the arrival of such a single-payer plan.

FiveThirtyEight >> Not All Socialist Countries are Alike