Warning; "Public Option" is a scam thought up by insurance comanies. It can't work for many reasons!

[Baobab]

Some More Info

[slipslidingaway]

1. knr "... A shooting star in our movement has streaked across our lives and vanished too soon..."

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/08/12/saying-goodbye-another-single-payer-warrior-shooting-star



The Dems, including Obama, pushed a national HC system to the back burner while rescuing the for profit insurance and drug companies



http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/06/16/public-option-pales-next-single-payer

"The “public option” preserves all of the systemic defects inherent in reliance on a patchwork of private insurance companies to finance health care, a system which has been a miserable failure both in providing health coverage and controlling costs.

Elimination of U.S.-style private insurance has been a prerequisite to the achievement of universal health care in every other industrialized country in the world. In contrast, public program expansions coupled with mandates have failed everywhere they’ve been tried, both domestically and internationally.

Many progressives accept that the “public option” is inferior to a single-payer system, yet support it because of its perceived political expedience. It is my aim today to convince you that the “public option” program currently being developed is not only bad health policy, but bad health politics..."

[slipslidingaway]

2. THE HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC OPTION...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6456383

http://prospect.org/article/history-public-option


"...it's worthwhile to trace the history of exactly where this idea -- a compromise itself -- came from. The public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort to put all the pieces in place for health reform before the 2008 election -- a brilliant experiment, but one that at this particular moment, looks like it might turn out badly. (Which is not the same as saying it was a mistake.)

One key player was Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future. Hickey took UC Berkley health care expert Jacob Hacker's idea for "a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare" and went around to the community of single-payer advocates, making the case that this limited "public option" was the best they could hope for. Ideally, it would someday magically turn into single-payer. And then Hickey went to all the presidential candidates, acknowledging that politically, they couldn't support single-payer, but that the "public option" would attract a real progressive constituency. Here's Hickey from a speech to New Jersey Citizen Action in November 2007:


....Starting in January, we began to take Jacob Hacker to see the presidential candidates. We started with John Edwards and his advisers -- who quickly understood the value of Hacker's public plan, and when he announced his health proposal on "Meet The Press," he was very clear that his public plan could become the dominant part of his new health care program, if enough people choose it.


The rest is history. Following Edwards' lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker's policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now's political strategy. It was a real high-wire act -- to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won't be the kind of deal that could "become the dominant player." So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much......"

[Baobab]

4. No, one has to understand GATS and iSA to understand this problem.

Also, tha GATS was written to eliminate the safety nets globally and prevent public health care. So Clinon's 1994 "plan" was a scam also.

See:


GATS and Public Service Systems
http://www.iatp.org/files/GATS_and_Public_Service_Systems.htm

and

The Wrong Model: GATS, Trade Liberalisation and Children’s Right to Health
http://www.iatp.org/files/Wrong_Model_GATS_Trade_Liberalisation_and_Chil.htm

[Recursion]

3. Ironically even Max Baucus's idea was better

Baucus wanted to basically copy the German system and have people buy insurance from regional co-operatives that were member-owned. Private insurance could then provide supplemental plans (like for a private room, quicker non-emergency appointments, etc.)

As far as I know that's the one idea Max Baucus ever had right...