The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has just come out with its findings that the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill, while not my personal favorite to date, will actually reduce the deficit over 10 years. Matt Ygelsias posts the chart here.
Fox News Anchor Shep Smith won't let Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) spout the same old fear-inducing myths about the Public Option unchallenged:
Former Senate Majority Leaders Bill Frist and Bob Dole both come out favorite healthcare reform as is currently being fashioned. In Dole's case he chastises his own Republican Party for knee-jerk partisanship. (It looks like Obama is able to find the bipartisanship he seeks -- only with GOPers no longer in office.)
And now an idea started by Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has the potential to end the debate and get a Public Option passed: giving individual states the right to Opt-Out of the government run insurance plan if they like. This requires a kind of proactive Federalism on the part of the states, and thereisnospoon over at DailyKos outlines the benefits of this approach (headlines -- go here for details):
- It forces GOP legislators to put up or shut up, leaving them in a very uncomfortable position.
- It leaves the rest of us with a strong public option, even after it's watered down.
- It hampers the ability of Republicans to lie about healthcare issues.
- Businesses will have an incentive to move to blue states.
The latter could be a major plus for California, with our now 12% unemployment rate. But the big news would be, as the piece points out with its own partisan opinion as to who would win:
Rarely do the Left and the Right have a head-to-head opportunity to prove out, in real time, the relative superiority of their respective value systems and legislative choices, with real and immediate consequences not only for the partisan legislators involved, but for the legitimacy of a Party's entire ideological underpinnings.
I say let the contest begin.
6 comments:
The real lie is that the public option, isn't truly an option. It's a cleverly disguised path to universal health care. (A pig with lipstick on it)
Opt-out = federalism at its best! Jefferson and Calhoun would be proud.
I feel certain that all those honest and true "State's Rights Republicans" will jump onboard now!
I'm curious as how being able to buy insurance plans "across state lines" is going to help anyone? Aren't those wonderfully competitive plans that are currently available over the next state line basically the same? Doesn't CIGNA have health plans in more than one state already? How is being able to buy the same plan as Joey in New Jersey going to create competition and lower costs when its the same companies who control them?
And health care for all would be bad because...
Slick I'm not sure, but my Blue Shield of Washington plan working for a Northwest company was a lot less than the cost of a Blue Shield of California plan.
Health care for all isn't a bad idea, and to be honest we already have it. There is free clinics all around, and a hospital will not deny you health care even without insurance. So what we're really talking about is health insurance for all.
Health insurance is basically the same as belonging to a discount club like Price Club, because you belong and pay your high membership fees you don't pay nearly as much in the terms of goods and services. Another analogy it's a giant union that negotiates the price of things for your behalf. When you get the bill you're shown what you would of paid without insurance, and then you pay your co-pay / deductible. Meanwhile the health insurance company pays a fraction of that cost that was previously negotiated by the Doctor and Health Insurance company. (More like it's a big list of procedures and the Insurance company says how much they will actually pay for a procedure (Actually even more really, it's based off the Medicare rates of what the government will pay for the procedure)).
But let's forget all that for a moment.
Giving out health insurance without a way to pay for it is a bad idea. Let's see and talk this out rationally from a pure economic sense.
Health insurance for all gives insurance to people who previously...
A. couldn't afford to pay for health insurance.
or
B. have a pre-existing condition and were denied health insurance.
or
C. could afford health insurance but chose not to get it.
So possibly a public option, or universal health care pays for persons A and persons B. The benefit of a public option is that B, probably could pay but was denied coverage in another system.
Person A. is a drag on the system, because they have didn't have money to afford in the beginning, so that money has to be made up in the form of taxing someone else.
Person B. is not necessarily a complete drag on the system because they may not be lumped in with group A, however they were probably not "insurable" because the potential for high costs in treatment of a pre-existing condition.
So all this money needs to come from somewhere, and if we don't have it, we print more money and things get worse. Just because you want something doesn't mean we can do it.
Fu -
If I correctly read what you wrote, I think you're missing the point a bit. One of the problems w/ the current system is that Groups A, B, & C are already a drag on the system, and they're a drag in ways that are currently far more expensive than they need to be.
To wit:
Group A: Because these people don't have insurance doesn't mean they don't get sick or injured. When they do, they go to emergency rooms (which is the most expensive and inefficient of all healthcare delivery systems) or clinics (which are similarly extremely ineffiecient owing to logistical factors). Just because these people don't pay for their care doesn't mean it's free. You as a taxpayer pay for it. Currently. Right now. Somebody in CA walks into an ER and can't pay, the hospital charges it back to the state, state charges CA taxpayers.
Additionally, because these people don't have insurance, they don't get preventive or early care, and in many cases their problem gets worse and much more expensive to treat. Consider: (there are millions of examples, but here's one I know of personally) a friend w/ no insurance had stomach pains. He decided to tough it out until the pains went away. Oops: wrong decision. After a few days the pain was so bad he couldn't stand up, was turning ashen, and he hobbled to an emergency room. He had had an infamed appendix, which in the first few days could've been treated pretty easily and cheaply (as an outpatient) with antibiotics. Unfortunately, by the time he went to the ER it was now a burst appendix and resultant system wide gangrene. They basically had to open him up, pull his appendix, hose down all his internal organs and sew him back up. Result: 24 days in the hospital, on the taxpayers of NY state. (You can take a guess what this cost; hint: 6 figures). This is an extreme example, but you get the point. Go to any emergency room in the country and you'll see greater and smaller versions of this every day.
Group B: These people get sick, too; obviously they're extremely likely to since they have pre-existing conditions. All of the above for Group A applies to them, except that since they're not poor, the hospital bankrupts them first, then charges the balance to the taxpayers.
Group C: Same as Group B, except since they're usually younger that Group B, they get bankrupted more quickly and the taxpayer picks up a greater tab.
In additional, the current system carries a host of other problems: it makes it more dangerous to be an entrpreneur, kills wage increases, makes it hard for small employers to compete w/ large employers, makes it harder for US employers to comete w/ foreign companies, etc, etc, etc. This list of bad outcomes goes on forever.
And again: All of this is being paid for already; the current debate is about how to shift this cost around more efficiently. A simple way to look at it is that in the U.S. today $1 spent buys $.72 of care. Obama's trying to close that gap somewhat.
This isn't a question of printing money, it's a question of doing things more efficiently. It hasn't been done yet because the system as it stands is great for insurers, which are far more powerful than any other interest group, including the banks. It also hasn't been done because, although there's an undeniable benefit to the nation overall, there will be individual winners & losers, just like there are when the gov't decides to build roads in one place rather than another, or to subsidize gasoline instead of pub transit, or to overcrowd a school rather than raise school taxes. Just the way it goes.
One day when I have a lot of time, I'll post something about a national debate I witnessed ~ 10 yrs ago in Germany over K-12 school taxes. It was 1000% more intelligent that anything we'd see here, and the result (which made perfect sense) would cause riots here.
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