Single Payer vs Public Option: What was your Plan A?

Forget for just a moment the current shitstorm swirling around our heads.

Go back. Go way back. Back before the election. Back before the nomination. Back, even, before the primaries. Maybe even back before the 06 midterms.

What was your initial Plan A: Single Payer or Public Option?







I will bet no one even used the term "Public Option" back then.





So why the FUCK are we seemingly willing to settle for less than our initial Plan A?

meeting certain criteria in salary.

For the ones who didn't meet the criteria require all the thieving ass insurance companies create low cost plans for those people and have them sign up through the government to get into the low cost plan they want.

Require all insurance companies to offer low cost dental plans
Require all insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions
Require all insurance companies to offer low cost prescription coverage as a part of medical
Require all insurance companies to offer Health and Dependent care FSA
I'd also like to see some reform that will help to bring malpractice prices down
Put regulations on Rx companies and change the compensation structure for Rx sales reps no more commissions and monitor Dr. and Rx corp relationships.

too much for everyone right now but later they need to put it in for all people.

if the public option is real. Now after negotiating against themselves, the Democratic politicians have put the "public option" at risk. My A plan has always been single payer but I realize Americans are probably the most propagandized people outside of North Korea here in the 21st century.

I really don't care if the idiots keep bending over for the insurance companies. As long as I can get affordable health care and everybody else has that option too I am fine with it. They know as I do that people by and large will go for it that is why even that will be hard to shove through.

with a little lee-way on how large or small a group is "single".

A pool of 47 million people in a government administered insurance program, is probably bigger than some Canadian provinces.


Obviously, if "single payer" is defined as one insurance plan for all Americans, then schip, Medicaid, Medicare, Va, all have to be combined and then expanded to include every American not currently covered by those entities.

Which makes total sense... but it was never going to happen.

Dean puts the estimate at 5-10 million.

Will a plan with so few participants be real competition for the insurance companies???


Reply to critics of “Bait and switch: How the ‘public option’ was sold”

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/08/08/reply-to-critics-of-%e2%80%9cbait-and-switch-how-the-%e2%80%98public-option%e2%80%99-was-sold%e2%80%9d/

by Kip Sullivan, JD

"...The Herndon Alliance was founded in 2005 by many of the same groups that would create HCAN in 2008. The Herndon Alliance paved the way for HCAN’s promotion of the “public option” with some laughable “research” claiming to find that Americans want a “public-private-plan choice” approach and don’t want a single-payer system. I have written elsewhere about the bogus “research” conducted by the Herndon Alliance. Suffice it to say here the Herndon Alliance cooked up a new and more insidious version of the “political feasibility” argument.

Until about 2007, when the Herndon Alliance first began publishing its “research,” there was only one variant of the “political feasibility” argument, the one that said the insurance industry is too powerful to beat. The Herndon Alliance variant claimed single-payer is not feasible because Americans don’t want it. According to this variant, American “values,” not the insurance industry, are actually the greatest impediment to single-payer. According to the Herndon Alliance, Americans “value choice of insurance company” and “they like the insurance they have and want to keep it.” HCAN and Hacker picked up these refrains and promoted them vigorously to the public and to members of Congress. This inexcusable attack on single-payer no doubt helped key committee chairs in Congress (Kennedy, Baucus, Waxman, Rangel and Miller) feel more comfortable taking single-payer off the table and concentrating on the “public option.”

By early 2009, it was clear the Hacker-HCAN-Herndon Alliance propaganda for the “public option” and against single-payer had worked with the Democratic leadership, and that the Democratic leadership would fall once again for a market-based alternative and remove single-payer from the table. The removal of single-payer legislation took place without the firing of a single shot in public by the insurance industry and the right wing. It took place at the request of the “yes but” wing..."

You are really ignorant about Public Option or Single Payer if you think they are the same.

Do some research.

Already written and ready to roll.

I am just being realistic. We are not getting Single Payer with Obama, period. I can not cut off my nose to spite my face. I will be following Jane Hampshire's lead by supporting the progressive caucus on the Public Option. It is better than nothing and too many people need something, even if it is only the Public Option.

Not arguing with you. But how sad is THAT?

"Better than nothing".

It's efficient, the plan is in place and we could have spent all this political capital shoring up Medicare for the future.

Plus, it would have put Repubs on the hot seat -- do they or don't they support Medicare?

We have to "settle" for something. This country is not far enough left for single payer. It still has a substantial number of conservatives in it.

Politics is the art of compromise, we have to live with these people. Sure we can tell them to leave (they did it to us) but no one takes that seriously.

So we settle for the public option today and in 30 years maybe we'll expand it to cover another 10 million people?

NO - MEDICARE FOR ALL NOW.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2009&base_name=the_history_of_the_public_opti

"....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:

.....


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.

The alternative history question would be: What if they had pushed for single-payer all along? Could the political process then have sold them out and compromised by supporting the public option we now look likely to lose?"



Campaign for America's Future Blog Chronicles Impact of Hacker Health Care for America Plan on the Evolution of the Edwards and Obama Health Proposals

Health Care for America

By Roger Hickey on January 11, 2007 - 4:14pm.

http://www.ourfuture.org/files/documents/evolution-of-the-healthcare-debate.pdf

"The great debate over how to fundamentally fix our broken health care system just got a lot more interesting.

Today, the Economic Policy Institute released the Health Care for America plan – a simple yet sophisticated approach crafted by Jacob Hacker, author of “The Great Risk Shift.” Health Care for America, which you can find at www.sharedprosperity.org, comprehensively tackles the major health care problems holding back our society and economy: the 46 million uninsured, the skyrocketing costs and the uneven quality.

My organization, Campaign for America’s Future, will be launching a nationwide effort to discuss and debate how to get good healthcare coverage for all Americans while controlling spiraling health care costs. The best way to start that debate is to put a simple, clear and progressive health care plan on the table. Health Care for America is that plan, and it will be a benchmark by which all other plans can be judged.

How? By creating a Medicare-style system for all Americans under 65. The uninsured and underinsured could buy into the Health Care for America plan, with federal or state government assistance if necessary. Medicare and Health Care for America would then join forces and wield enormous bargaining power, driving down costs and raising the bar on quality..."

I had never heard of the term "Public Option" back then.

If presented with the choice at this stage (hypothetically) of Public Option or nothing, I don't know. Do I want to watch health care reform implode again, especially if I have to see repubs celebrating the political damage to Obama and no guarantee that this would blow up in the repubs' faces in 2010 and 2012 with the economy (deficits) and Afghanistan perhaps being bigger political issues.

I believe that Obama really wants a Public Option and will push very hard for it. But I also accept that he is a pragmatist (and political realist) who will accept whatever "reforms" he can actually achieve, even if it is far from what he really wants, rather than see reform go down in flames again (on principle) with the potential damage to his ability to accomplish other goals that he has.