Everyone should have to live in New Orleans for a year before they option for the government to have more influence in their life in any form. If a check up becomes like a getting an illegally car towed, the only way to do it will be to drop c notes in the health czars refrigerator. In all srsness, is more bureaucracy ever the solution?
Arguments against a public option
slartibartpants answers my question about what his perceived problems with a public option and subsidies to achieve universal coverage,
A public option will lead to: more government intrusion into our lives, higher taxes, a lesser level of care, lower efficiency and less innovation—this is true for 99% of government programs and subsidies and I’m a man of the odds.
Let’s do these one at a time.
More government intrusion into our lives? Be more specific. If you elect a public option, of course government will be entangled in your healthcare in the same way that the government is involved in (wildly popular) medicare. But if you don’t sign up for the public option it doesn’t immediately follow that the government will intrude into your life. Unless you count efforts to standardize medical forms as intrusive. Or is something like comparative effectiveness testing, where treatments are tested for relative effectiveness rather than merely safety and efficacy an intrusion?
Higher taxes? I’ll grant this. While a properly constructed public healthcare option should be self-sustaining, extending coverage to the uninsured won’t be free. Fixing streets also leads ot higher taxes. So does any government action. In this case, I’m willing to accept a higher tax burden to cover the less fortunate.
Less innovation? Again, you need to connect the dots for me. Some government programs—like the space program—led to a great deal of innovation. All our meaningful aereonautics research is also through the government. Public universities or private universities using public funds have also done a lot of innovation. How will a public option lead to less innovation?
Lower efficiency? No. In many cases, I would agree that the government is particularly efficient. It is certainly not optimally efficient. But the bar is set so incredibly low with the private insurers. Medicare’s overhead is significantly less than that of the private insurerers. Currently, it seems to be more efficient. Pointing out that the government wastes money is not sufficient. You need to somehow show that the government wastes more money than large private industry. If this is too difficult, you could argue that taxing the money out of somebody’s bank account, routing it through the IRS, and subsidizing somebody who can’t afford insurance creates a lot of friction that you wouldn’t have if you just left it in the guy’s bank account. This is true—but in this case, most of the country prefer the good result to the “efficient” bad result.
A lesser level of care? Elaborate. The public option will use the same doctors and same hospitals. What is being cut that private insurance hasn’t already cut? Currently, our military hospitals provide some of the best care in the world. (And, when they don’t, it’s a national scandal and gets fixed immediately.) The most common objections to medicare is not that there is a “lesser level of care.” It’s that there is too much care paid for through fraudulent or unnecessary claims.
I don’t find any of these reasons persuasive when weighed against increased transparency, decreased redundancy, increased accountability, and universal availability.
