What's Your Opinion of a Health Care Reform Bill without a Public Option?

How would you respond to a healthcare reform bill that did not contain a public option, but did have some sort of trigger?

I haven't seen the details of the trigger and don't think it will be an issue.

Remember a couple of weeks ago it was cooperatives.


It will have a public option but may have some other compromise - stronger assurances of deficit neutrality.

But I don't think this President is gonna go that route.
And yes, I would be pissed if he did....
But as a self employed, I need the Public Option,
so I'm gonna fight for it.
But at the end of the day, I'll take what I can get......

Structured the right way, a triggered public option would be fine.

I was a buyer for a large Co. for a number of years, and I understand you rarely get everything you want in any negotiation.

Then we could have compromised on a strong public option. I mean in any negotiation you need to start out asking for the moon, even if you are dealing with people who are negotiating in good faith.

Including the congress/administration

They did this to take a dive, and for no other reason. Nobody is so stupid as to enter the negotiation with a compromise out of the gate.

or any reform will just be another way for the insurance companies to increase their profits. Ultimately, people who have pre-existing conditions will just be given money to buy health insurance from the insurance companies. More money for them at our expense.

The insurance companies should not profit over health care reform and that is what they are going for. People who are currently uninsured will get something but the cost to the taxpayers will go right into the pockets of the insurance companies. I guess I have a real problem with the insurance companies profitting off what is ultimately their ongoing negligence to the problem.

private insurers using tax money, so that the Republicans can again point to the program as another example of bad government, while not mentioning that they engineered it.

It would be a total waste of time without the public option.
TOTAL WASTE OF TIME!

mark

The money needs to be spent on health care, not insurance.

Medicare. We will have been sold out again to the industry. I was very disappointed in Steny Hoyers interpretation of what will come out of the Senate during his Town Hall meeting. We need health care for people, not welfare for the health and PhRMA industries.

my feeling is that without a public option, it is mostly corporate welfare for insurance/health"care" corps, having very little to do with Universal Healthcare that the nation truly needs.

Given the plans that Congress is considering, I think a public option is probably necessary. However, you can achieve universal health care without it, theoretically. Both The Netherlands and Switzerland rely on for-profit insurers and an individual mandate, but they heavily regulate their insurers and the government negotiates prices for drugs and procedures. Insurers also have to provide a basic standard package that is priced the same whoever the insurer. The Clintons' 1993 proposals also didn't include a public option but like the Dutch and Swiss systems required a basic minimum package. The Wyden-Bennett bill does the same thing.

My feeling is that the White House has made one big mistake on the public option: they've been way too wishy-washy on it. If "choice and competition" is their line, that should have been their line from the start. And if they favored a public option, then they should have insisted upon it, like they insisted upon other features (the details could have been left to Congress). Instead, by basically promoting the idea, but hinting that it could be dropped they've left everybody confused and guessing their motives, and they've undercut congressional negotiations, in which holdout Dems and the few Republicans (re: Snowe, Collins) who may support it feel free to propose things other than the public plan. They've also encouraged the base and many congressional liberals only to undercut them by hinting the public option could get dropped.

is going to be funded in large part ($500 billion + over the next decade) by CUTS to the Medicare/Medicaid (during the time when millions of boomers are supposed to enter the Medicare system, i.e. during the time when the nearly bankrupt system needs additional funding, NOT CUTS!)

why Democrats/progressives are not livid about this is UNCOMPREHENSIBLE.

...& I will not vote for Obama or Dems if they cave.

The public option, as scored, is too small to be relevant

If they don't want to reform healthcare, just drop it. We don't need pretending.

Better to do nothing than to further enable the criminal insurance industry.

want health care reform and if there isn't a public option it isn't health care reform. And the trigger? they can shove it where the sun doesn't shine.

...back there would be no one to pick up the massive amounts that are going to be uninsured.

besides Public Option? :shrug:

THERE'S YOUR TRIGGER. Our current healthcare emergency.

We spend so much more than other industrialized countries and DON"T COVER EVERYONE yet.

We hit the trigger years ago and that's one of the main reasons we rushed out to vote for President Obama and the Democrats.

Trigger was sprung.

Our legislators bent over backward time and again to "keep things fair" for the private sector while things became less and less fair for over 40,000,000 of us.

The private sector had over ten years since last stomping out national health insurance to show us how they could do things better. Where are we now, thanks to our legislators' previous attempts to help the private insurers? MILLIONS MORE UNINSURED, MILLIONS MORE BANKRUPT, COSTS AND PRIVATE PROFITS ESCALATED.

The trigger has been on 3-alarm status for years now. Enough is enough.

And I don't want some fancy new system we have to spend the next 5-7 years discussing while Republicans stall.

Open Up Medicare to All who choose it. Open it up and improve it -- HR676.

and there is an individual mandate, the Democrats will lose in 2010 and likely in 2012.

If they cannot get it done with all of the advantages they have, they were never interested in getting it done in the first place. I have better things to do with my time than support liars, turncoats, and corporatists. Y'all can keep up the abusive relationship if you like, but I will be done with it.

would be massive regulation of the private insurance industry, including price controls, mandated coverage, etc. Essentially, turn them into not-for-profits.

Unfortunately, that would have even less chance of making it through the bought-and-paid-for Congress.