The original Jacob Hacker plan was named "Health Care for America" and it did not include subsidies to private insurance companies. Also it talked about rolling the Medicaid and SCHIP programs into the public plan, this would have given the PO plan a large base from which to negotiate.
The well funded organization "Health Care for America (Now)" was formed in 2008 to promote the public option idea and groups signed on in support of the idea.
The original number of enrollees in the plan were estimated at over 100 million participants, the first estimate was done early in this decade and then a later estimate in 2007. Both of these estimates were done by the Lewin Group who became affiliated with United Health Care in 2006. Early in the discussion at least one Democrat quoted the Lewin analysis and people believed the PO would have many enrollees, but it changed.
What you hear now is Republicans fighting the original plan to scare constituents about a government take over, when in reality the Democrats have changed the plan significantly and it is just a shell of the original idea. As the article below mentions some progressives are now left defending the PO, no matter how much it has changed.
When the Hacker public option idea was being discussed, many saw this as a stealth move to SP and got on board with the idea. The current proposals in no way resemble the original ideas, but people are still supporting the watered down versions proposed in Congress.
Here is a video of Jacob Hacker and the Economic Policy Institute speaking about the Hacker plan, that does not sound like any of the plans currently under discussion?
Health Care For America
just over 3 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-J9ZgCRiD8 As Kucinich said... Kip Sullivan who wrote the Bait and Switch articles has it figured out.Full article...
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2009&base_name=the_history_of_the_public_optiDU thread...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6456383"...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..."
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