Rejoice TeaBaggers, you’ve won. Break out the Milwaukee’s Best!!!
The Senate Finance Committee rejected an amendment last Tuesday that would have created a government-run health insurance plan, but debate over a proposed public plan is not expected to end at the committee.
By a 15-8 vote, the Finance panel rejected an amendment sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., that would create a public health insurance option. Under Rockefeller’s amendment, a government-run plan would inherit Medicare’s network of doctors and hospitals and pay them based on Medicare payment rates for its first two years.
All Republicans on the panel voted against Rockefeller’s amendment, in addition to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Thomas Carper, D-Del.
Democrats supporting the Rockefeller amendment pointed to several states in which only a handful of insurers – sometimes as few as two – provide insurance coverage for the majority of those covered. The public option, they said, would guarantee a low-priced plan for consumers.
Republicans lambasted the amendment as an attempt to expand the federal government’s reach and eliminate private insurers. A public plan would “crowd out” private insurers with artificially low prices, eventually forcing private insurers to absorb unpaid costs within the U.S. health system and charge their policyholders higher premiums.
Insurers are strongly opposed to a public health insurance plan in any form. Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the America’s Health Insurance Plans trade group, said in a statement that a public health insurance option “would dismantle employer coverage, bankrupt hospitals, and add to the federal deficit.”
Members of AHIP include leading insurers such as Aetna Inc., Humana Inc., Cigna Corp. and UnitedHealth Group Inc.
While I’m decidedly pro-reform and pretty neutral on the public option as a whole (just do something, anything, please!) I find it quite amusing that lobbyists for companies like Cigna, United Health, and Humana wield so much influence in this process, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in their back pockets. Then again, I can understand such dogged opposition to such reform, given the fact that each of those companies continues to gross staggering profits, and can afford to pay their CEOs a pot of gold coins in bonuses each year. On an unrelated note: 2,000 folks stood in line all day to get some free medical attention at a healthcare fair in Houston last weekend.
Just throwing that one out there, is all I’m sayin’.
Either way, I just hope this doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for healthcare reform. I know the protagonists (you know who) would much rather do nothing and “wait until the economy improves,” which essentially means never.
We’ll see.
Question: Do you think the prospect of the public option is officially dead? Do you think it’s essential to any substantive HC reform, or merely another piece of the puzzle?
US Senate Panel Rejects Adding Public Plan To Health Bill [WSJ]
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Ultimately this is a test for progressives and people who still have faith in the democratic process.
I agree with RiPPa. It would be better if the President and various “leaders” did not settle for the compromised position of the public option and worked hard on “Medicare for All,” as many Democrats campaigned on, but having the public option is a very important piece of the total legislation, don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that making it illegal to deny someone coverage for having a “pre-existing condition” and other parts of reform as the only and most important part of health care reform. The public option is suppose to be competition to the private insurers and suppose to lower the cost of insurance, anyone who thinks that this is not important does not understand that premiums have skyrocketed and for many people, poor and the middle class, the ER is the only place to get care. One of the things that has not been in the discussion is preventive care and some of the reasons why so many people get sick; diet, environment, and lifestyle, but because this issue of health is complex and the public as a whole is misinformed and uneducated, the public option is one issue that seems to change at least the top of the problem.