Letter to the Editor

[cos]

Last night, I submitted this as a letter to the editor to USA Today:

For decades, private for-profit insurance companies have been spreading fear about "government run health insurance". Despite the fact that people on Medicare - run by the government - are more satisfied with their insurance than people on private insurance, the private insurance companies have been telling us that national health care wouldn't work, because the government can't run a good insurance system, and we're all better off with private insurance. Obama's plan puts their claims to the test, and it's time to put up or shut up.

Obama proposes a compromise between a national single payer system, and the private insurance we have now: he wants to put a public health insurance option in the same market as private companies, to let people choose and see what works better.

Insurance companies' complaints about "unfair competition" are a smokescreen. They want to mislead us into a conversation about how to be fair to insurance companies, while they continue being unfair to the American people.

What the for-profit insurance companies are really saying is that they fear the government can run a better health insurance - that satisfies people more, and leaves us healthier, at a lower cost. They may be right. Congress owes it to us to create a public option so we can try it and find out. Stop worrying about the health of the insurance companies, and care for the health of the American people for a change.

Comments

[cos]

Nope. You're being far too reasonable. The point you're making isn't one that I've seen take much of a role in public debate on this issue.

What I have seen as a talking point, over and over and over, is that creating a public option would be unfair competition for the private insurance companies, because the public option would have competitive advantages over them, with the power of government, and thus the poor little insurance companies might fail despite being as good as they can be.

I've seen this question raised at some of those town hall meetings, I've seen it in clips from traditional TV news, I've seen it raised repeatedly by Republican members of Congress... it's so pervasive that when I got into a conversation about this with a random stranger in Pittsburgh who saw that I was into politics and I asked him what he thought of Obama's health care reform, he didn't know much about it but even he raised this point: "I've heard that ..." It's kind of crazy, but there it is - this is what people are talking about. This is what Republicans and Fox are pushing: That a public option would be unfair competition for the private companies.

Edit: On the redistributive nature of government-run health insurance - which is totally a tangent from the point of my letter - I want to point out that it's more of a redistribution from the healthy to the injured and sick, than it is from the wealthy to the poor. In other words, it's about spreading the risk more evenly, more than about spreading the income more evenly.