CBO: Public Option Would Reduce Premiums for Everyone
Posted by MEC on September 14, 2009
As reported in Truthout, a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Senator Michael Enzi (R-Insurance Lobby) has detailed its conclusion that offering a Public Plan for health insurance would help to control costs for everyone:
…it would add some competitive pressure in
many insurance markets that are currently served by a limited
number of private insurers. That competitive pressure would
probably lower private premiums in the insurance exchanges to a
small degree.
The CBO’s analysis assumes a “revenue-neutral” public plan, that is, a plan in which all the costs are covered by enrollees’ premiums, not by tax revenue. The public plan wouldn’t increase our taxes or use anybody’s tax dollars. It would just make it possible for people to get health care who can’t afford it now or who have been refused coverage by private insurance companies. And that’s the point of health-care reform: guaranteeing that everyone who needs medical care gets it. Without a public option, there is no such guarantee.
11 Responses to “CBO: Public Option Would Reduce Premiums for Everyone”
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jacksmith said
Why A Strong Public Option Is Essential – By jacksmith — Working Class
Robert Reich explains the pubic option: http://bit.ly/dDYSJ http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
John Garamendi on the Public Option and the Grassroots: http://bit.ly/TJMty
It’s not just because more than two thirds of the American people want a single payer health care system. And if they cant have a single payer system 77% of all Americans want a strong government-run public option on day one (86% of democrats, 75% of independents, and 72% republicans). Basically everyone.
It’s not just because according to a new AARP POLL: 86 percent of seniors want universal healthcare security for All, including 93% of Democrats, 87% of Independents, and 78% of Republicans. With 79% of seniors supporting creating a new strong Government-run public option plan, available immediately. Including 89% of Democrats, 80% of Independents, and 61% of Republicans, STUNNING!!
It’s not just because it will lower cost. Because a strong public option will dramatically lower cost for everyone. And dramatically improved the quality of care everyone receives in America and around the World. Rich, middle class, and poor a like.
It’s not just because it will save trillions of dollars and prevent the needless deaths of millions more of YOU, caused by a rush to profit by the DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!
It’s not just because every expert in every field, including economist, and Nobel laureates all agree that free market based healthcare systems don’t work. Never have and never will. The US has the only truly free market based healthcare system in the World. And as you all know now, IT IS A DISASTER!
It’s not just because providing or denying medically necessary care for profit motivations is wrong. Because it is WRONG! It’s professionally, ethically, and morally REPUGNANT!, Animalistic, VILE and EVIL.
THE REASON THE PUBLIC OPTION IS ESSENTIAL:
The public option is ESSENTIAL because over 200 million of you are trapped in the forest of the wolves. Which is the forest of the DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! With no way out except through needless inhumane suffering, and DEATH. While the wolves tear at your flesh, and rip you limb from lib. Then feast on your lifeless bodies like a dead carcase for transplant parts.
At the most vulnerable times of your lives (when you were sick and hurting), millions of you have had to fight and loose cruel, but heroic battles. Fighting against the big guns of the DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! in the forest of the wolves. All because you have no place else to go. You have no other CHOICE!
But the PUBLIC OPTION will give you someplace safe to go. And it will give us someplace safe to take you. The public option will be your refugium (your refuge). Where the wolves cannot get at you when your down, hurting, and vulnerable. Where everyone who needs it can find rest, security, comfort and the care they need. Protected by the BIG GUNS of We The People Of The United States. THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE AND COUNTRY ON EARTH.
This is why it is so critical that we do not lead another 50 million vulnerable, uninsured Americans into the forest of the wolves, without the protections of a Strong Government-run public option. We The People Of The United States MUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN to any more of our fellow Americans. If healthcare reform does not contain a strong public option on day one. YOU MUST! KILL IT. Or you will do far more harm than good. And millions more will die needlessly. Rich, middle class, and poor a like.
To those who would continue to obstruct good and true healthcare reform for the American people, and who seek to trap millions more vulnerable Americans in the forest of the wolves. We will continue to fight you. We are prepared to wage all out war against you, and will eagerly DESTROY! you. Time…is…UP! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! No Co-op’s! No Triggers! NO INDIVIDUAL MANDATES! without a Strong public option on day one.
Healthcare reform can be the GREATEST! Accomplishment of our time and century. A time when future generations may say of us, that we were all, AMERICAS GREATEST GENERATIONS.
BUT WE MUST ACT!
I therefore call on all my fellow Americans and the peoples of the World. To join us in this fight so that we may finish becoming the better America that we aspire to be for everyone.
SPREAD THE WORD!
I have been privileged to be witness as many of you fought, and struggled to take your first breath, and your last breath on this earth. Rich, middle class, and poor a like. Life is precious.
Whatever the cost. WE! MUST SUCCEED.
God Bless You My Fellow Human Beings
jacksmith — Working Class
No Triggers! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-rosenbaum/a-trigger-for-the-public_b_277910.html
Triggers http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/weve-seen-these-triggers_b_283583.html
Krugman on heathcare (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-cant-cure-healthcare/)
Senator Bernie Sanders on healthcare (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSM8t_cLZgk&feature=player_embedded)
Phoenix Woman said
Eggzacktly!
lambert strether said
Phoenix Women writes:
Parsing carefully, I see that there’s no claim made that with public option, there is a guarantee. For the sake of the argument, I’ll nevertheless assume that’s the claim.
Of course, a claim that public option guarantees that everybody who gets Medicare needs it simply isn’t true. “Public option” (or “plan”) advocates have long accepted defining “universal” down so that it doesn’t mean 100%, but 95%. The 15 to 20 million people in the uncovered 5% aren’t “guaranteed” care at all.
In addition, it’s unfortunate to see the continued conflation of health insurance with health care. Last I checked, Crystal Lee Jordan’s cancer would have been unlikely to be cured in a health insurance company’s call center.
Single payer advocates, of course, have the philosophy of “everybody in, nobody out” so we can shoot for the straight 100%. And single payer advocates don’t confuse health insurance with health care; people have health care as a matter of right.
Charles II said
Ah, the luxury of being ideologically pure when it’s almost a dead certainty that no reform, whether providing health care to almost all Americans or to all Americans, will pass.
lambert strether said
Better no bill than a bad bill. And if you think that’s purity, then you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Me, I think avoiding the likely outcome of being forced to buy junk insurance is a win.
NOTE Personally, I think wannabe insiderism and groupthink is its own form of “purity”; it couldn’t have been possible for “progressives” to run a bait and switch operation on “public option” (or “plan”) unless they had somehow convinced themselves that was OK for the truly pure in heart…
lambert strether said
Forgot to say:
Your comment is a two-fer: (a) umresponsive; by your silence you admit my point that the original post was wrong on the facts as to a “guarantee”; and (b) a shift to “any stick to big a dog” style argumentation; obviously, the state of my soul, or my motives, or whatever — “purity” — is entirely off point. I’ve often wondered if it’s the stress of defending an inferior policy position that makes otherwise good people go off the rails like this…
Phoenix Woman said
Lambert also missed who actually wrote this post. But he was too interested in attacking anyone who dares support the Possible Good as opposed to the Impossible Perfect.
He also ignores the fact that many of single payer’s Congressional supporters only backed it when it didn’t look like it was actually coming up for a vote — now that it is, they’re backing off from it.
Oh, and now is as good a time as any to mention that Hillary Clinton’s 1993 proposal did not involve single-payer, and that as recently as February of 2007 — some months before she and Obama were the last candidates left standing in the primaries, in other words — she was being taken to task for being timid in her health care advocacy.
Charles II said
Oh, come on, Lambert. You yourself clearly understand that absence is not proof of non-existence. If I choose not to engage your claim about the relative “guarantees” of actually getting health care of the public option vs. single payer, that is not proof that I agree with it. If you were reading the rest of the blog, you’d realize that I might have something on my mind other than arguments that, as the roshi says, “bake no bread.”
For the record, I support single payer and always have. I am pleased that a bill that would provide it will be offered in the House. Maybe some miracle will happen and enough people will vote for it to make it a reality. But if that doesn’t happen, yet we manage to get even sort-of affordable access to medical care for another 20 or 30 million people, I will count the 20 or 30 million sort-of blessings. I will also be counting down to the cost explosion that forces us into single payer.
But I think the most likely outcome is that you will get your wish of no bill.
ShortWoman» Blog Archive » Baucused said
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