Welcome leadership, worrisome trend
Obama Aides Aim to Simplify and Scale Back Health Bills - NYTimes.com:
As to dropping a public option, I continue to see this as a critical item. The most likely "consensus" items for the bill would be to disallow private insurers from excluding coverage of preexisting conditions, or from refusing sicker, or higher risk, patients altogether. In the absence of a competing public plan to participate in the health insurance market and provide price, feature and quality competition for the private insurers, I simply do not see where any significant cost control will come from. All that the proposed restrictions will achieve is to allow certain people to buy very expensive private insurance, insurance they likely can't afford.
It is certainly no answer to say that the government will subsidize the cost of private insurance. All that will create is a huge transfer of public funds to private insurers, and to health services providers. Such a plan will increase costs for everyone, most particularly tax payers.
One possiblity is to mandate coverage for everyone. Spreading the risk pool tends to bring premiums down. Presumably some portion of the currently uninsured is made up of younger, healthier people who could afford coverage but are choosing not to buy it based on a cost-benefit calculation. If you force them into the pool it should reduce premiums. In practice, I doubt that would actually work. That population is probably much smaller than some would have it, and there is no reason to think that actuarial savings would go to the insured, rather than in to insurance company profit margins.
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements.As I have said, I agree that Obama needs to get personally and directly involved, not so much in the details of the reform legislation as in promoting the need for reform and neutralizing some of the opposition.
Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.
But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.
As to dropping a public option, I continue to see this as a critical item. The most likely "consensus" items for the bill would be to disallow private insurers from excluding coverage of preexisting conditions, or from refusing sicker, or higher risk, patients altogether. In the absence of a competing public plan to participate in the health insurance market and provide price, feature and quality competition for the private insurers, I simply do not see where any significant cost control will come from. All that the proposed restrictions will achieve is to allow certain people to buy very expensive private insurance, insurance they likely can't afford.
It is certainly no answer to say that the government will subsidize the cost of private insurance. All that will create is a huge transfer of public funds to private insurers, and to health services providers. Such a plan will increase costs for everyone, most particularly tax payers.
One possiblity is to mandate coverage for everyone. Spreading the risk pool tends to bring premiums down. Presumably some portion of the currently uninsured is made up of younger, healthier people who could afford coverage but are choosing not to buy it based on a cost-benefit calculation. If you force them into the pool it should reduce premiums. In practice, I doubt that would actually work. That population is probably much smaller than some would have it, and there is no reason to think that actuarial savings would go to the insured, rather than in to insurance company profit margins.
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