Support for the Public Option Keeps Getting Stronger

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from OurFuture.org:



Support for the Public Option Keeps Getting Stronger
By Roger Hickey

October 26, 2009 - 6:44am ET

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“New Life for the Public Option” is the headline of Dan Balz’s excellent article in Sunday’s Washington Post. It’s not an accident that this powerful idea has made yet another comeback. And it is not surprising that public and Congressional support, always strong, has surged again, just as the insurance industry has ham-handedly tried to manipulate the choices of key decision-makers in the US Senate. In the crucial next few days – and in the weeks to come – advocates of the public option will be arguing that the principle of majority-rule democracy should be allowed to work. And the insurance and drug industries (and Republicans) will be basing their strategy for stopping the public plan on undemocratic procedure called the filibuster.

The public option has been part of the national health care debate since January 2007, when the Economic Policy Institute published Jacob Hacker’s Health Care for America plan. From that moment to this, many in the media and the pundit class have periodically dismissed its chances. But that was also the moment that Hacker, Diane Archer and I started having discussions with three essential audiences: leaders of activist citizen organizations, Congressional leaders, and presidential candidates. (For a record of that early organizing, click here.) Our message: a public insurance option is crucial to the success of real reform in America’s mixed system of private and public health insurance – especially if our government agrees to the demand of insurance companies that all Americans must be forced to buy insurance.

Those early conversations and the primary election campaign debates produced a consensus in favor of a public option, as first candidate John Edwards (in February 2007), then Barack Obama (in May), and (in September) Hillary Clinton all came forward with health reform plans based primarily on preserving employment-based health insurance for those who have it and reforming and expanding private health insurance for those who don’t. And all three Democratic presidential candidates called for a public insurance plan, like Medicare, that would give Americans choices – and give the private insurance companies real competition that could control health care premiums.

Even though some progressives were committed to a pure single-payer plan, leaders of many of the major organizations representing millions of Americans – unions, community networks, civil rights groups and health advocates – realized that private insurance companies would not soon be put out of business. Drawing on Hacker’s work, these groups came together around a plan for reforming the worst practices of the insurance companies, requiring all but the smallest firms to cover their employees, guaranteeing affordable coverage to everyone through an insurance exchange, and offering a public insurance option as one of many choices in the exchange. The Health Care for America Now! coalition, now representing 1,000 citizen organizations and millions of people, was built around these principles – and HCAN has consistently insisted that if you take away one part of the plan -- whether it is affordable coverage, insurance reform, or the public option – and the whole enterprise of building reform on a mixed system might just collapse and end up throwing money at the insurance and drug companies without achieving real reform or universal coverage. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104426/support-public-option-keeps-getting-stronger