The False Public Option

Fooling the public. Again.

Any public plan is likely to have a relatively narrow scope, as it would be offered only to people who don't have access to coverage through an employer.

The public option would effectively be just another insurance plan offered on the open market. It would likely be administered by a private insurance provider, charging premiums and copayments like any other policy. In an early estimate of the House bill, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that fewer than 12 million people would buy insurance through the government plan.

  WaPo

So there would be no economy of size for lower premiums or bargaining power for cheaper scrips.

Advocates of a “public option” claim that the “option” will look like Medicare. [...] But this statement is not true.

Medicare is larger than any private insurance company; the “option” in both bills will be small. The traditional Medicare program is a single program with uniform benefits; the “option” in both bills will be a balkanized program that may not be available in all parts of the country. Medicare is administered by public employees; the “options” in both bills will be administered by private-sector corporations, some or all of which will be insurance companies. The “option” in neither bill resembles Medicare.

[...]

As the preceding rather convoluted description of MACs and contracting administrators suggests, neither the HELP bill nor HR 3200 makes it easy for readers to grasp that corporations, not public employees, will create, and probably run, the “option” program. Neither bill comes right out and says, “The Secretary shall hire private-sector corporations to create and run as many health insurance companies as is necessary to make health insurance available for sale to the non-elderly in each health insurance market in America.” Nor is that fact being ballyhooed by the bills’ authors and proponents. But it’s an important feature for “option” supporters to understand because it undermines the claim “option” advocates make over and over that the “option” will look like Medicare.

  Physicians for a National Health Program

Set up to fail.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.