Thursday, October 15, 2009

Public Option Revived?

I see in today's paper that the Senate is considering ways to include some form of public option in the health care legislation. The stated reasons are fears of high costs for the plan and mistrust of insurers.

It sure has taken them long enough to figure that out. Both reasons are valid. The proposed plans cost too much because our legislators refuse to identify the root causes of the high costs and to write specific laws to reduce them. The continued pressures of insurance company lobbyists and campaign contributions have blinded our lawmakers to the greed of the insurers. These issues are not new--I have mentioned them from the start in my posts on health care costs. Maybe the reality is beginning to set in for our lawmakers.

It is obvious that we are not going to keep the federal government out of the health care situation. I suspect most people want the government to find a way to make health care more affordable, and therefore more available.

The initial solution seems almost silly: force everyone to buy health insurance. There is no better way to drive the cost of health insurance costs even higher. If we want the government to take action, and if we want everyone to have health insurance, then a public option is mandatory. If the public option is not part of the deal, the insurers will raise prices to their hearts' content, and government (taxpayers') money will be paying that price via subsidies for individuals who cannot afford the increased premiums. Has it taken the Senate so many years to understand that simple fact?

What other obvious flaws are in the health care bills proposed in the House and the Senate? We don't know. We haven't read the thousands of pages of the bills. Nor have most of our legislators.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had access to a simple 'dot list' of the elements of each proposed bill so we could see exactly which cost drivers are being addressed, and how they are brought under control? That will never happen because the lawmakers fear that such a list would generate more opposition than support. Each item on the list would offend a major lobby or source of contributions. Insurers would oppose the public option; pharmaceutical companies would oppose any action to reduce the prices of prescription drugs, and so on.

Congress should expect that kind of opposition to any legislation that is designed to bring the price of health care down because that legislation reduces the (excess) profits of the providers of health care goods and services. But that opposition comes from a small minority of our population who make large campaign contributions and who hire persistent lobbyists. The voting majority of the population are the consumers who purchase health care; they will support reasonable measures to reduce the price of good health.

The public option is one of those reasonable measures.