Compared with Medicare, the public option (was) a very small, very weak policy experiment.

[jefferson_dem]

What we end up getting may be a better deal than a paper tiger "public option".

Ezra Klein from yesterday -

Medicare vs. private insurers

...

Compared with Medicare, the public option is a very small, very weak policy experiment. It was always, as Jon Cohn says, a faint shadow on the wall of the real idea, which was Medicare for All. This isn't Medicare for All, either, but it's Medicare for More, and it changes the character of Medicare in a way that's very dangerous for the private insurance industry.

As things stand, 65-year-olds get enrolled in Medicare. Buy-in is something of a different beast: Folks between 55 and 64 with access to the exchange could choose to buy Medicare. That sets up an apples-to-apples comparison. And that apples-to-apples comparison is not going to come out well for private insurers, as Medicare has a large and acknowledged price advantage over them. They might be fine with that, because no one wants to insure 60-year-olds anyway. But I doubt they're going to be fine with a world in which people see the full difference between the prices private insurers offer and the prices a robust public insurer can offer. That, after all, is why they fought the strong public plan so ferociously.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/medicare_vs_private_insurers.html

[IndianaGreen]

1. Is this the new spin? Telling us the public option wasn't that important

after Obama dropped single payer from the table?

[jefferson_dem]

2. Not the new spin...

You get what you can get. The wimpy public option would have been less "robust" and reform-oriented than this so-called compromise.

Got a problem with it? Howard Dean doesn't. http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/12/08/dean-buy-in/

Public option aside, there's plenty of ace reform measures that this bill will deliver...eliminating coverage denial based on pre-existing foremost among them.

[Kdillard]

3. It should be interesting to see the details of the new plan and CBO

Scoring. We have no idea on how they intend to bring healthy people into the program otherwise while better than the PO being presented the cost will be astronomical and we won't be able to sustain it.

[DrToast]

4. Come on. Seriously? You really think they're going to kill the PO so we can get something better?

Do you believe there's any possibility of that actually happening?

[jefferson_dem]

5. Sure.

Three-dimensional chess and all. :)

Let's look at the end result and compare to what would have been with the watered-down public option that was stalled out.

Besides, in all the talk of healthcare during the campaign, how often did Obama mention "public option"? Funny that's become the "be all end all" litmus test.

[IndianaGreen]

6. back to Obama's 23th dimensional chess, I see.

:puke:

[jefferson_dem]

8. That was a totally tongue-in-cheek comment

And meant to tweak the likes of ... yourself. I see it worked. :hi:

[Clio the Leo]

7. So what keeps insurers from raising prices for everyone else?

Is it because they weren't making money on 55+ ers to begin with so they wont take much a hit?

[OHdem10]

9. With Medicare, it has been so gutted through the years that we now

either must buy a Medi-gap policy or join Medicare Advantage.
They are taking away Medicare Advantage. They are making
cuts right and left. Every state now has doctors refusing
to take Medicare Patients.

I do not mean to sound negative. I have lived long enough
to know how great Medicare was at one time. Medicare as it
now stands is not adequate. Throwing the 11 Million Medicare
Advantage members plus all the uninsured---can they afford it.

Is this why it will take until 2014 to have people covered.
Yet they start paying taxes immediately.