Health Insurance Industry’s $300 Billion Victory Over the Public Option
By: Jon Walker Wednesday March 3, 2010 9:27 am
TweetTweet Share33
When Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and the entire Republican Senate caucus stepped up to kill the public option in the Senate,
it is important to remember that the health insurance industry won a victory—a victory worth $300 billion. As Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) now try to crush attempts to revive the public option inside a reconciliation measure, they are battling to protect that extra $300 billion that will flow to AHIP as a result.
The public option was never just a “sliver” as Obama tried to claim. It was about a fundamental moral right and the role of government. But what it was also about was a huge amount of money.The CBO projects that the relatively weak public option–the one limited just to the exchange in the House health care bill–would secure roughly one-fifth of that market, equal to around 6 million people (PDF). The CBO concluded that, as a result of those 6 million customers, the public option will take in $298 billion (PDF) in direct premiums, exchange subsidies, and risk adjustment payments from 2013-2019. However,
with the public option removed, but the individual mandate remaining, that $300 billion will instead go straight to the private insurance corporations’ books. If, like I personally suspect, the CBO slightly underestimated the popularity of the public option, and it manages to secure instead roughly a third of the customers on the exchange, that would be roughly $500 billion that the public option would take from the private insurance companies.
more:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/03/03/health-insurance-industrys-300-billion-victory-over-the-public-option/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
