It’s baaack! The “public option”—the government-run health insurance program that Democrats really wanted when they jammed through the Affordable Care Act—has been revived.
The public option’s leftist backers, including Hillary Clinton and President Obama, are a little vague on how the new version would work. But in the Obamacare version—which the Senate dumped to get enough votes to pass the law—the public option was a government-run, nonprofit, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance plan that would have provided coverage through Obamacare health insurance exchanges.
Supporters like to say it’s similar to Medicare, but for those under age 65. In fact, it would likely operate much more like Medicaid, the worst health insurance program in the country. But somehow “Medicaid for all” doesn’t have quite the same appeal.
And there is no reason to think that a public option—whether state-based or federal—would work any better than Obamacare’s failed, non-profit, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance co-ops.
Fifteen of the 23 original Obamacare co-ops have closed their doors because of huge financial losses. That’s $1.5 billion taxpayers will never see again.
And most of the rest of the co-ops are on financial life support. Without more taxpayer money, which apparently won’t happen as long as Republicans control Congress, most of them will go under soon.
The media like to claim that the co-ops have failed because they didn’t know what they were doing and underpriced their policies. In fact, none of the Democrats who wrote and passed the legislation knew what they were doing.
They were convinced that by “taking the profits out of health care,” health insurance would become affordable. Well, they’ve taken out the profits, all right.
Even the major, for-profit health insurance companies with decades of experience covering millions of lives have lost billions of dollars. And now several of them are pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges, leaving consumers with fewer options and higher costs.
But apparently nothing succeeds like failure. The Democrats seem to think that the only reason that the co-ops are failing is that they didn’t throw enough taxpayer money and government control at them.
You no doubt recognize this excuse. Obama and the left have said exactly the same thing on multiple occasions about why the February 2009 stimulus package failed to stimulate the economy: they didn’t pour enough money into the effort.
Which takes us to the real reason why Clinton, Sanders and Obama are all calling for a public option—and it’s not to improve access to health care. If they really wanted to do that, they wouldn’t be calling for more states to expand their Medicaid program.
The modus operandi is to get something passed, it doesn’t much matter what as long as it grows the role of government in health care. When that effort fails miserably, the left claims it’s because the government and bureaucrats aren’t spending enough.
The fact is that the government has 50 years of running health insurance programs: Medicare and Medicaid. How’s that working?
According to the Medicare trustees, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities—money the program will owe over and above the taxes it takes in—of $32.4 trillion over the next 75 years. Medicare’s Office of the Actuary puts it more like $43.5 trillion. That’s “trillion” with a “t.”
As for Medicaid, which is a federal-state program, Kaiser Health News reported last year: “Medicaid is one of the largest items in state budgets…. States typically try to control costs by cutting payment rates to doctors and hospitals or reducing benefits—both of which can have negative effects on enrollees by making it harder to get care.”
Besides 50 years of health insurance, the federal government has nearly 100 years of experience in directly providing health care: It’s called the Veterans Administration, where thousands of vets have died because of long waiting lines, rationed care, inefficiency and outright fraud and deception—and that’s two years after Obama promised to fix the problems.
The public option is the left’s next step in taking control of the U.S. health care system, because they won’t rest until we have Medicaid for all.