Reply #200: Sure. So what this means is this:

[gorfle]

..Did you NOT hear him say that the government would "subsidize those who can't afford it"?

What this means is this: I get to continue to pay for my own for-profit private health insurance while also paying for other people's health insurance.

I don't mind paying for other people's insurance, as long as we are all benefiting from the same plan.

All the proposed plan does is create a new welfare project that the people who pay for it can't use.

The good news that came out of his announcement was the removal of the yearly and lifetime caps on treatment, and removal of the ability to drop people who get sick, and the removal of the preexisting condition denial.

The bottom line is this, and the President said as much, as I have said before: The health insurance industry is too huge for the government to destroy it. It would destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and millions of jobs. There is just no way the government is going to start a brand new, lower-cost insurance company that will drive the current insurance industry out of business. If they jumped through hoops to save the auto industry, they are not going to destroy the health insurance industry.

Which is sad. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the health insurance industry has an annual profit rate of 25%. A government-run, not-for-profit health insurance company would immediately see a 25% decrease in the costs of its services. Such a company would put private health insurance out of business overnight. Oh, sure, there would still be some private health insurance companies out there for well-off people who wanted to buy coverage on top of what the government offered, but most people are simply going to make do with the government-run insurance plan.

Our government probably doesn't have the political ability to destroy the health insurance industry if it wanted to, and for economic reasons it doesn't even want to. So the Public Option is basically fucked. Yeah, there will be a subsidized Public Option for poor people, but it will never be cost-competitive for non-subsidized people to participate in it, and consequently it will never compete against private, for-profit health insurance.