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73 Percent: Want Americans To Have A Choice Of Private Or Public Health Coverage
Wonk Room —
Most progressives — including President Obama — argue that allowing a new public plan to compete with private insurers would increase choice, promote effective competition, bring down health care costs and create incentives for effective performance. (Jacob Hacker has much more here).
Well, a new poll released today by Lake Research found that most Americans agree with this argument. “A whopping 73% of voters want everyone to have a choice of private health insurance or a public health insurance plan while only 15% want everyone to have private insurance.”
Republicans and the insurance companies are part ...
The Importance of a Public Option
Matthew Yglesias —
To try to clear up something about yesterday’s post on a Swiss model of health care reform I don’t, personally, consider something like that adequate. I don’t think it’s the appropriate role of progressives in the United States to be pushing for subsidies and mandates for insurance companies in exchange for the right to regulate the companies more tightly. That might be an improvement over the status quo, or not, depending on how it played out over subsequent years’ worth of legislative battles. I think it’s important to fight for a public option which, as Igor Volsky notes, is a wildly popular idea as well as sound ...
Baucus: We Can Accomplish Health Care Reform ‘Without’ Public Health Plan Option
Wonk Room —
Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT) has argued that you can’t reform the health care system without forcing private insurers to compete with a new public option. “If we only get community rating and guaranteed issue that’s great insurance reform, but that is not health care reform and nobody should mistake it,” Dean explained.
But Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has recently indicated that the public plan is just a bargaining chip to “encourage the private health insurance industry to move in the direction it knows it should move toward—namely, health insurance reform, which means eliminating pre-existing ...
Baucus: We can accomplish health care reform ‘without’ public health plan option.
Think Progress —
Today, during an event at the Center for American Progress Action Fund about reforming the health care system, ThinkProgress asked Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) if he agreed with Gov. Howard Dean’s (D-VT) argument that the government can’t improve the efficiency and quality of the health care system without giving Americans the choice of enrolling in a new public health care plan:
Let’s see what we come up with. I think we can accomplish the objective [Dean] wants without [a public plan]. We can, we’re going to have to work on it. But we may have to have it, [Dean] may be right. Just don’t know ...
Media Buys What The Health Insurance Industry Is Selling
Wonk Room —
During yesterday’s hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, America’s Health Insurance Plans President and CEO Karen Ignagni attempted to discourage Democrats from enacting a new public health care plan by reiterating the industry’s support for guaranteed issue — offering coverage to every applicant — and modified community rating — charging everyone the same premiums — (so long as both regulations are paired with an individual requirement to buy insurance).
Press coverage of the event centered around the insurance industry’s so-called “concessions”: ...
