Reply #45: The public option is not like Medicare and it is not like single payer...

[slipslidingaway]

it is a unique animal, if people want to sell that fine, but do not misrepresent what it is.

http://www.openleft.com/diary/15309/pnhp-founder-calls-howard-dean-a-liar

"A few months ago one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), the main group of doctors advocating Medicare for All in the United States, called Howard Dean a liar for saying that for the average American should think of the public option as a Medicare opt-in.

"He's a liar," Himmelstein says.

"He knows that the public option plan is not single payer and he says it is to try and confuse people," Himmelstein said. "He goes on Democracy Now and other shows and says that people can buy into Medicare when he knows that what is in the plan is not that."

"Medicare doesn't have to compete," Himmelstein said. "That's why it's so efficient."

Himmelstein says that the Obama plan would mandate that people buy insurance from competing private plans - and one denuded public plan.

The private health insurance companies would cherry pick the young healthy patients, while the sick older patients would opt into the public plan - making the public plan unsustainable.


The article was from Single Payer Action. It did not include a whole lot of detail and seemed somewhat hastily written, so I went to the transcript on Democracy Now for more.

Here's the section in question...."