Reply #24: A lot should if PO preempts State mandates on coverage and consumer rights

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Most the the so-called public options will not be subject to existing state laws requiring coverage beyond the Federally mandated levels and with less consumer protection than these states currently require. Remember what happened when credit card reform made things much worse for consumers by barring states from regulation and oversight.

The insurance companies lobbied hard to get Federal approval that would allow them to sell health insurance in multiple states without having to be licensed in each state and subject to state laws. They claim that this would reduce the cost of health insurance, but my guess is that this would be another disaster like the CCs.

I believe that single payer is what we should have and the only system that survive the ever-increasing rate of change to all aspects of society. (Much more later.) I have seen a Public Option as a partial way to restrain certain excesses by the insurance industry, since we lack leaders willing and able to stop them anytime soon.

As various proposals for how to provide a public option are revealed, most of them include barely detectable flaws which likely limit their effectiveness and cause significant damage elsewhere in places and ways few expected. After some effort looking for design mods to shrink or eliminate the flaws, I have concluded that a public option of any form will never be able to respond fast enough.

Those who believe that markets can determine value (monetary, of course) through the interplay of competing products, providers, consumers, and such. They seem unaware of some basic concepts in the sciences and engineering. First, strange things start happening at the extremes: near absolute zero, under great pressure, near the speed of light, and of course everything sub-atomic. Most of our human-scale world operates far from these extremes, leaving us unprepared when some system is suddenly operating near one or more of its extremes -- likely result with very high speed computers and networks and programs making decisions so fast that the speed of light is forcing competitors to co-locate their computers with the electronic market and each other, thus avoid milisecs of disadvantage, but also eliminating any further termporal advantage for anyone.

They also seem unaware that when efficient markets have eliminated all but the most efficient suppliers and lowest cost suppliers, they have also eliminated almost all profit and have become extremely unstable -- any drop in demand, such as in the past year, make it impossible for the suppliers to meet their fixed costs and low demand prevents price increases. Low profits in previous periods have limited their cash reserves, so they all have little opportunity to respond in any way. This is a dangerous way to build sustainable systems.

There might be a way that Medicare for all cut be defined to contain the problems elsewhere.