Perhaps we should do the same thing with education, water and sewer, the fire department, the police force, national security, justice and welfare.
We could do it on a really large scale and NOT call it government.
Sure, I’m fine with a healthcare co-op, better yet a single national co-op that covers everyone in the country. A single payer co-op if you will.
Yep. American Universal Co-Op 4 Jesus! Just don’t tell anyone it’s a collective. =D
A for profit health care system wants to keep you from costing them money. The old maximize profits thing we love so much. They do not want you to have health care. They want to charge you for it. But want to avoid providing it.
A Medicare type system will save money by encouraging you to live healthily and to have preventative medical tests. They want you healthy.
A variety of reasons
For one, a Co-op could be bought out or pushed out of the marketplace by private insurance companies. A public option wouldn’t be bought out, would have better negotiating power and would have lower premiums, up to 30% lower.
The CBO estimated a public option would save $150 billion over 10 years because it would increase competition. If we get co-ops instead of a public option, we are giving a $150 billion handout to insurance companies to protect them from competition. Like others have said, we have co-ops. I do not know if those co-ops would result in $150 billion in savings over the next decade.
I would say the big reasons are more philosophical than yelse though.
Private insurance companies make many of us on the left angry. They consider things like being a victim of domestic violence a pre-existing condition and use it to deny coverage, and they are funding ads designed to mislead people about ‘death panels’ when they have real life death panels already functioning. They deny up to 20% of all claims, and people die.
Now we are being told that we are going to be forced to buy insurance from these companies under threats of fines. Many of us on the left are not happy about that.
Another thing that makes us angry is, we won the election. We have 59 senators (excluding Specter), about 257 house members and a president who won with a mandate. Progressives want single payer medicare for all. If we can’t get that, we will compromise and pick a strong public option based on medicare.
So even though we progressives helped the dems get elected, we are being told to compromise our compromises. We are being asked to compromise single payer for a public option, and then asked to compromise the public option for co-ops. The republicans don’t compromise anything, but we are being asked to compromise single payer for a public option, then compromise that for co-ops.
However some of the GOP has said they’d oppose co-ops too. For many of us, it angers us that we got Obama and the dem elected, and they respond by telling us to shut up while they figure out ways to placate republicans and tea party activists, who lost the election for a reason.
And then there is the whole philosophical argument about government. One of the big reasons conservatives oppose the public option is that it will work. Due to lower overhead and better negotiations, a public option would be 20-30% cheaper than private insurance by some estimates. So if given a choice, many people will pick the public option. Conservatives know this, and don’t like it because it will debunk their whole philosophy of ‘government can’t do anything right’.
Basically, in my experience, many of the arguments are more about the role of government.
If we don’t get a public option, then we are handing out hundreds of billions of dollars to private insurance industry since they don’t want to face competition, and we will have a weak congress that refused to stand up for its base. And those of us who are morally opposed to private insurance and would prefer a public option will not be allowed to have one.
Even if a co-op could provide real competition and save money (which it probably will not), progressives will still have lost the debate over who gets to run the country.