I’m sure it’s too late for my opinion to matter on the topic but I’ll lay it out here anyway.
1) I think the Democrats have gone about this all crabbed. Health insurance reform should be approached from a consumer protection angle, not an “everybody has a right” angle. If you want to sell a product called “health insurance” then you need to meet certain federal guidelines on what you do and do not cover. Health insurance coverage shouldn’t be any harder to understand than when you motor up to a gas pump and decide what octane rating you want the gasoline in your car to be.
2) Not having a “public option” is bullshit. I can’t believe the package we’re getting doesn’t include one. When you’re running a small business with 5-20 employees it’s a bitch to track down a policy that’ll actually cover you at a reasonable cost. We really should let the feds gobble up a giant pool of policies that meet their criteria (see point 1) and then resell them at cost to small business owners. Insurance companies get a giant customer pool with a single payer out of it and small businesses would have a nice “default” to go to if they don’t want to invest man hours in shopping around for something better.
3) Go ahead and regulate the profit margins while you’re at it. Health insurance is nothing more than pushing money from party A to party B and taking a bit of profit for your trouble along the way. It’s not much different than lending really and we’ve all accepted that the government can regulate interest rates to some extent. Let the government set the actuary tables on the health policies and hold the insurance companies to that. You want more profit or market share? Do it through better customer service and gathering more customers. Seems to work for the Swiss.
4) Just get rid of Medicaid and drop those people into the public option plan. Either pay for it out of the general fund or weight the premiums paid by those on the public option so that they’re covering folks that cannot afford it.
What’s wrong with that?
