Public Option... Lost???

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Submitted by Captin Sarcastic on Mon, 2009-08-17 09:19.

I have been frustrated by the recent news that the public option could be out of the healthcare reform proposals, but on second thought, this may be some clever political jujitsu. The consumer protections and mandates served the purpose of putting private insurers on an even field with the public option. The public option plans oculd not compete if only they were accepting pre-existing conditions, and following other elements of the consumer protection elements of the reform proposals, and my frustration was that without the public option, the mandates and consumer protection aspects were just new guaranteed customer for private insurers without any counterbalance of the public option.

Then I was thining about it, and what the public option really is, and how easy it could be to pass later. The start up costs for the public option are about $2B, which in parlance of the federal government, is about a penny, and could probably be done without legislation at all, but I doubt it would go that way.

The public option could be tagged onto any old spending bill, and the initial costs wouldn't probably get the slightest notice.

It's the mandates and the consumer protections that made the public option viable, so I could not for the life of me understand why they let the public option slip away, but really, if they get the rest of it, creating an exchange or non-profit to offer huge group policies is probably a fairly simple thing once separated from the rest of the proposal.

Just a thought.

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your own words...

#7381 On Tue, 2009 08 18 06:26 ka1igu1a said,

You are sort of making my point that i keep posing to you about "regulatory capture." You are saying it would be fairly easy to legislatively implement a "public option" as a supplement to some spending bill; well, wouldn't it be just as easy to amend/alter such an option through the same process, thus subjecting your "remedy" to regulatory/political capture to the same capture. Your position on "regulatory capture" is not tenable...

You mention "regulatory capture" quite a bit, but it seems to be your recurring position that "strong government action" is necessary to restrain/prevent such capture or reverse previous instances of capture, all the while failing to explain how such preventative/corrective instances of strong government action that you advocate themselves won't be captured.

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Possibly

#7385 On Tue, 2009 08 18 09:02 Captin Sarcastic said,

A strong public option, in the form of a not-for profit corporation, would be something along the lines of a Fannie Mae, so yes, would not be immune from regulatory capture, but because of the size of such an entity over time, it would more likely become a capturer, not capturee. As long as it's charter was to provide value for citizens, as opposed to shareholders, then it's own exagerration of power on the system should serve to enhance the quality of healthcare.

Don't bother making the obvious comparison to the bad that can come of this relative to Fannie Mae, it's a given. If you are waiting for a perfect solution, keep waiting and enjoy the status quo, until the system breaks down so completely that a public system becomes unavoidable.

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