"The Policy That Dare Not Speak Its Name" -- Robert Kuttner

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Portion of article below; whole article here: http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/in-the-news/2009/june/the-policy-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.html

Republicans and the health industry have been kicking and screaming that this [Medicare-like public plan] is socialistic. But the poll suggests that defenders of the public plan have nothing to fear politically, and that Republicans are in danger of getting on the wrong side of a popular issue.

However, that's only the beginning of the story. The reform package, as drafted by the Obama administration and the House leadership, is dubious legislation even with the inclusion of a public option. Basically, it leaves the two worst aspects of the system intact. First, private insurers will continue to dominate. Second, most people will continue to get their insurance through their employers. Given these two bedrock realities, there is no way that the bill can make serious inroads on cost without cutting back on care. The high cost of the approach is already causing key legislators to back off. The current system wastes huge sums, but because it is so fragmented the money flows to profit opportunities and not to the most cost-effective forms of health care.

Also, as my American Prospect colleague Paul Starr warns, a mixed system with a public option effectively invites the most expensive and hard-to-treat people to opt for the public plan, while private insurers will seek to insure the young and the healthy. This is a familiar problem known as adverse selection. The private insurers will then smugly point out that the public plan is less "efficient," when in fact it simply will have a more costly population. The only way to avoid this problem is to have everyone in the same universal plan--what's otherwise known as a single-payer plan.

The public option is a not-very-good second best--because our leading liberal politicians lack the nerve to embrace the one reform that simultaneously solves the problem of cost, quality, and universal inclusion. The policy that dare not speak its name is of course comprehensive national health insurance, or Medicare-for-All. I try to avoid using the term "single payer," because a technical, policy-wonk phrase not understood by most civilians has become insider shorthand for national health insurance. Let's call the thing by its rightful name. Medicare-for-All is something regular people understand.

The Times-CBS poll is evidence that this is what more than two Americans in three really want. Most voters have not followed the nuances of how the public option in the Obama plan would compete with private insurance. The poll simply indicates that voters want access to a straight-up, Medicare-style plan to be available to one and all. In past polls, when Times-CBS pollsters ask whether people favor national health insurance, responses generally favor Medicare-for-All by margins of about two-to-one.

In the current debate, liberals find themselves fighting to keep the public option alive, so that some form of efficient, publicly-run health insurance will stay in the mix--but knowing that it is embedded in a reform package that is far more costly and inefficient than it should have been. Instead of validating the common sense and reformist demands of ordinary Americans and identifying the insurance, drug, and corporate elites as the obstacles to real reform, too many of our liberal leaders from President Obama on down hope to co-opt business elites with a convoluted scheme that undermines the efficiencies of a comprehensive and universal system. And just wait until it gets watered down further in order to retain the support of these same elites. A plan that all of these groups would endorse would not be worth having.

So what's the matter with our politicians? Why are the people so far ahead of their elected leaders on this one? One reason, as usual, is money. The combination of the insurance industry, the drug industry, the American Medical Association, the hospital lobby--all of whom oppose Medicare-for-All--represents a huge amount of political spending. It takes a brave politician to face down all of these industries, even though the people are on the side of real reform. The AMA's position is especially shameful, since the professional societies that represent most actual physicians favor national health insurance.

The second reason that liberal politicians wimp out on single payer is that the self-styled realists in this debate have decided that Medicare-for-All, even if it's the first-best system, is too hard politically. But think about it. Has the administration picked up one Republican vote by supporting the present system plus a public option? Hardly. The current House leadership bill, offering a mixed system, with a robust public option, a requirement that employers provide good insurance or pay a tax, and that insurers not discriminate against pre-existing conditions, is just as heavy a political lift as national health insurance--and far inferior policy. So why not just go for the first-best?