a modest proposal to balance Sen. Schumer's health care reform sabotage....

[mike_c]

Senator Schumer has proposed what amounts to a poison pill for a public health care alternative:

http://blog.healthcareforamericanow.org/2009/05/05/senator-schumers-health-care-compromise-dont-freak-out/

• The public plan must be self-sustaining. It should pay claims with money raised from premiums and co-payments. It should not receive tax revenue or appropriations from the government.
  
  
• The public plan should pay doctors and hospitals more than what Medicare pays. Medicare rates, set by law and regulation, are often lower than what private insurers pay.
  
  
• The government should not compel doctors and hospitals to participate in a public plan just because they participate in Medicare.
  
  
• To prevent the government from serving as both "player and umpire," the officials who manage a public plan should be different from those who regulate the insurance market.
  
  more@link

Jason Rosenbaum argues that this proposal might be a good idea, but he argues from the perspective of someone willing to accept a "public insurance plan" that must be regulated to make certain that it competes on a level playing field with private insurance industry offerings, thus insuring "fairness" in the competition for sick Americans' dollars, homes, future earnings, retirement pensions, and so on.

I propose a simpler, one-rule-applies-to-all compromise that, rather than forcing the public option to be just as bad as most private insurance options, forces the private insurance options to be as good as the public one, if they want to remain in the health care insurance business. Create the best single payer universal health coverage we can, run as efficiently as possible, funded by tax revenues, and then enact legislation providing one rule: no commercial health care insurer shall profit more than the public option runs a surplus for providing efficient health care management. Any excess revenues must be donated to the public treasury, i.e. taxed at 100 percent.

That's right. If you provide health insurance in America, you cannot profit at the expense of patients. You CAN provide needed services as a non-profit organization, and if you want to prove that you can do it better than the government, for similar cost, then by all means bring it on. But stop profiting from the ruination of sick and injured people and families.

I'll bet the public option will be the only one remaining within six weeks. Take away the greed, and the motive for most of the commercial health insurance industry goes with it.

on edit: Yes, I understand how unrealistic this is, especially in today's political climate where-- despite the circumstance that a majority of Americans want a single payer universal health care option, the country's political leadership is too beholden to the insurance industry to pay attention. But it is no less reasonable than Schumer's own proposed "compromise," which requires that the public option be just another flavor of commercial insurance, with all the flaws and injustices included so as not to harm the "business" of private insurers.

[EFerrari]

1. I can't hear you. First I have to get these vampires off my neck.

:grr:

[mike_c]

2. one last attempt to kick this into some discussion....

eom

[Wednesdays]

3. K&R

And on to the Greatest Page... :hi:

[alarimer]

4. Single payer should not have copayments or premiums.

It should come solely out of your taxes. But the costs to you should be SUBSTANTIALLY less than private insurance.

I suspect that Shumer is going to sabotage single payer by making it much more expensive than private. Then no one will choose it and Shumer will say it didn't work.