Joe Lieberman’s Bogus Public Option Reasoning
Joe Lieberman proposes:
“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”
Lieberman added that he’d vote against a public option plan “even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line.”
Jon Chait disposes:
It literally makes no sense whatsoever. A public plan does not provide a new entitlement. It just doesn’t. It’s a different form of providing an entitlement. Nor is it more expensive. In fact, the stronger versions of the public plan would cost less money. Lieberman is just babbling nonsense here.
It’s also worth emphasizing that while only the House-style public option will save a lot of money, even the relatively weak public option from the Reid draft would save money relative to doing what Lieberman wants. He’s talking about filibustering a deficit-reducing bill in order to try to remove a cost-reducing provision, and doing so on grounds of fiscal probity. It’s ludicrous, and the political reporters covering him need to point this out.
48 Responses to “Joe Lieberman’s Bogus Public Option Reasoning”
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October 27th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
You have to love this from Joe, –”I never saw an unfunded war I didn’t support” –Lieberman.
It’s like being lectured about thrift by the wastrel patriarch from a Dickens novel who drank the family’s fortune away.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_10/020653.php
Lieberman will tell whatever lie the highest bidder tells him to.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
“A public plan does not provide a new entitlement. It just doesn’t. It’s a different form of providing an entitlement.”
Huh? This makes no sense. Of course it’s a new entitlement.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
“the political reporters covering him need to point this out. ”
anyone taking bets on this one?
October 27th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Joe is just whoring for the insurance companies based in Hartford — and making up whatever babble he thinks will disguise that act.
He unwittingly makes the strongest argument I’ve seen made for the public option to date — that it would buttfuck the state of Connecticut and punish people there for inflicting this two-faced asshole on us all these years.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
@Al:
Health care reform in toto could be called a “new entitlement”… but any public option will be unsubsidized and dependent on premiums for its existence. So if Joe disapproves of a “new entitlement”, then he disapproves of the whole shebang… talking about the public option in that context makes no sense.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Let’s see Joe put his money where his mouth is and give up his government paid insurance plan and all of his money. Is he willing to face the health care system with neither money nor insurance? If not, he really doesn’t understand this issue. Next time he has a health care problem, he’d better not see a doctor. Because many of us can’t. And he wants to keep it that way for us. I’m really sick of people who have access to health care telling those of us who don’t that everything’s fine. Yeah, you think dying is fine? Try it yourself, motherfucker. Until you do, then shut the fuck up.
And that goes double for you, Al. I’d like you to face cancer without any insurance. Because no insurance is the plan you propose for me. Granted, it’s all I have now, so it wouldn’t be worse than the death sentence I’ve already received from the private insurers. But it’s kind of refreshing, I can kill anyone I want and I’ll live longer on Death Row than I will now. Oddly enough, they have to keep me alive on Death Row, which something nobody has to do now. So, Al, where do you live again?
October 27th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
social security is an entitlement: everyone is eligible for it.
the public option is a way of securing your health insurance and isn’t close to available to everyone. only al would have a problem with this concept.
but the serious reason i’m commenting is to note that given matthew’s exposure to “political reporters,” he surely doesn’t expect them to understand the issues well enough to question joe lieberman on this, does he?
October 27th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
“A public plan does not provide a new entitlement. It just doesn’t. It’s a different form of providing an entitlement.”
You sure “against the war before he was for it” Obama didn’t write that?
And the DemoFrauds think Lieberman is their problem?
HaHaHaHa!
October 27th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Beyond that, there are measures enshrined in statute that will prevent the public option from becoming an unfunded mandate; Obama promised that these would be in any bill he signed and I don’t doubt they will (he’d catch hell otherwise and rightly so). The public option, however it’s structured, is obligated to pay back any start-up funds. It isn’t allowed to become insolvent because it doesn’t receive discretionary funding. If it turns into the Titanic, Congress would have to proactively vote to fund it in the future. Ditto if subsidies break the bank. The GOP and Lieberman argue against the bills as if these sorts of provisions didn’t exist in all of them.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
@ChooChoo!
It reads awkwardly, but it’s right. The new entitlement is insurance subsidies for people above the poverty line, medicaid expansion, etc. The public option is a way for people to apply that entitlement to government-run insurance is they’d prefer to do that instead of put it towards private insurance. The public plan isn’t an entitlement; the subsidies you can put towards it or a private plan are.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“DemoFrauds”. Nice one! U R awesome! srsly!
October 27th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Yet another fiscal scold who seems to think that wars are paid for in magic pixie dust.
(fostert: whoa, there.)
October 27th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Zach gets this exactly right at #11.
He is, of course, wasting his time. Opposition to the public option has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the public option.
It’s like explaining evolution to creationists. If the facts don’t jibe with the talking points handed down from the mountaintop by his most holy prophet Saint Jesus Reagan of the Bleeding Invisible Hand (Peace Be Upon Him), they aren’t listening.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Now that I think about it, we should have a protest from those of us who will die in the next ten years due to lack of access to the health care system. We should pledge to murder anyone who votes against the public option and declare that we are doing it only because prison health care is better than what we can get now. And we should make it clear that we already have received the death penalty, so there is no penalty you can apply to us that’s any worse. I’m willing to do it, I’ve got nothing to lose. And nothing to lose is really what freedom is. I sure hope Joe Lieberman doesn’t mind dying for his beliefs. He sure wants me to die for them.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Lieberman’s like a toddler. He wouldn’t pull this kind of stuff if people didn’t give him attention for doing so.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
fostert, threats of violence? Not helpful.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I’m torn between my heart being on fostert’s side and my head being on LaFollette Progressive’s side. In a way, committing a crime to go to prison so you get better health care is like enlisting in the Army at the age of 40 because your wife has cancer and the only way for her to get health care is to join up. There are obvious differences: committing crimes is illegal and hurts other people, but perhaps the circle can be squared by people committing victimless crimes or crimes of civil disobedience short of murder.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Believe me I understand that Zach but thanks for restating it.
My point was only to do with the language which to any normal human being sounds like another idiotic attempt to mislead.
And since Matt’s post focuses on Lieberman’s supposed “bogus” reasoning…
The central problem with the Obama care salesmen is they promise more to more people at less cost. The Loaves and Fishes fraud.
Saving money? The Congress tells CBO they will cut Medicare
payments and there’s the savings.
But it is the much touted public opinion in favor of a public option which is really bogus.
First, almost none of those people know what the various public options mean.
More importantly they think it means something it really isn’t at all.
When they hear about “saving money” they think it will lower their insurance costs. Not.
They think it will be paid for by taxing the “rich”. Not.
They think it will, in addition to these things, provide them with more health care. Really not.
The truth is that Obama care will provide less care to more people at a greater cost.
That may well be a policy worth pursuing.
But it is being sold by lies and purposeful misdirection.
Not exactly Change to believe in.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
In my book, people dying of cancer are excepted from the rule of “don’t make violent threats against wicked politicians in discussion threads on blogs.” Particularly when said politicians do genuinely share some measure of responsibility for their predicament.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Jesus, Lieberman is a scumbag.
October 27th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Okay, so that was a little over the top, wasn’t it? But once you take the moral issues away, committing a crime to get health care is perfectly rational. I won’t actually do that. Instead, I’ll just die like my brother did. And I am already older than he was when he got cancer without health insurance. And he really is dead now. Had he been on death row, he might still be alive. And oddly enough, he is one of the people who sentenced me to death. Along with my sister (has cancer now), my parents (both died of cancer), and my grandparents (3 of 4 died of cancer). It’s that family history that prevents me from ever getting health insurance. So, I can take it like a man and just die like I’m supposed to, or I can take out some Republicans along with me. Either way, I’m a dead man walking. And I will save my Karma but not killing people. But the rest of you should understand that this really is a life or death issue for some of us. You can talk all you want about cost savings and economic policy, but this issue is much clearer for some of us. You are all simply talking about whether I live or die. I have already received the death sentence, I’m just waiting on the governor’s call. So if this issue strikes a nerve with me, understand why.
October 27th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
And you can scream all you want about how you’ll have to subsidize me. Fine, then consider this: I’ve paid FICA taxes all my life and so has the rest of my family. And not one of us has ever lived long enough to receive the Medicare and Social Security benefits that we paid for. So who’s subsidizing whom?
October 27th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
“They think it will, in addition to these things, provide them with more health care. Really not.”
So you really think I’ll get less care than now? Please, explain to me what negative health care is. I’m already at zero, so less has to be negative. So tell me what negative care is. Really, do you think a doctor will shoot me if I walk into a hospital under Obama’s plan? He’s already going to watch me die, but you really think he’ll just shoot me in the hospital lobby instead? Come to think of it, that might be better, but assisted suicide is still murder in most states, so I don’t think a doctor would do that.
October 27th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
“but assisted suicide is still murder in most states”
Well, unless it’s done by a cop, of course. Then it’s called “proper police procedure.” Even if the guy didn’t really want to die.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Much, if not most, of the publically-available evidence has for quite awhile suggested that Lieberman is something pretty rare — a person who is, on balance, genuinely evil. Over the course of his career, he has advocated positions that led to the deaths of many innocent people, and he’s done so not on the basis of misunderstanding issues or holding convictions that strike me as misguided but out of sheer cynicism and thirst for power.
Which isn’t reason enough to kill him. But if Fostert can wound him badly enough that he has to retire from the Senate, very likely he will have made the world a better place — and gotten health care for himself in the bargain! What’s not to like?
Or, speaking of Dickens, could we just arrange to scare Lieberman badly enough that he loses his mind? That kind of thing worked in Victorian novels all the time.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
@Al #3,
There you go again. You are egregiously conflating the subsidies with the public option. There is NO personal guarantee for any person, organization, class, race, gender or any other human group in the public option. It is merely one more insurance provider in each state’s or region’s Exchange.
It’s non-profit which means it will probably be somewhat cheaper than for-profit insurance, and I expect that’s what sticks in your craw. But it won’t be massively cheaper than the private plans because it still has to be at least slightly profitable over time, and that means that it has to have executives familiar with health care insurance and reasonably good actuaries. In actual truth it may not be cheaper at all, because the for-profit scumbags will dump all their sick people on it, raising the premiums for its members. But it will still help to reduce the overall cost of health care because it will remove the 8 to 14% profit raked off by the carriers.
The personal subsidies are given to low income people and families to spend on any insurance plan that meets the minimum criteria for inclusion in the state or regional Exchange that serves the recipient of the subsidy. It “belongs” to the recipient, not the plan.
You’ve posted here enough that it’s obvious that you’re not stupid. And in many of the other posts you have shown yourself to be familiar with the vocabulary of the issues about which you post. So, by process of elimination, you must then be a liar.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
The public plan is not an entitlement. The public plan is just like Medicare Advantage, except in the opposite direction. In both cases, people meeting certain requirements are eligible for assistance in acquiring health care. Medicare is primarily a public-run program but Medicare Advantage gives enrollees the option of a private-run insurance, and the Health Insurance Exchanges would primarily offer private-run insurance options, but with a public option there would be the choice of getting an insurance plan run by the government.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
fostert- fucking A!
As far as going to prison, tho, I doubt there’d be a jury found willing to convict after your story is told. Especially in CT.
I often wonder how many potential Ches are being awakened in these “very interesting times”. Desperate people do desperate things and there are more and more of them(us) out there.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:31 am
The weird thing is I don’t really blame the insurance companies for not insuring me. Hell, I wouldn’t insure me, either. And that’s just the cancer issue. I’ve got a neck X-ray on public record that’s even scarier than that. But the very concept of insurance is the broad risk pool. The idea is that most of the people will lose money on the deal, but some people will get treatment they never would be able to afford. If this were just a forward payment on known issues, it wouldn’t be insurance, it would just be a savings account. The insurance companies want to make it exactly that. They eliminate anyone with a potential risk to skew the risk pool in their favor. And they do it so much these days that insurance really is just a savings account, except with negative interest. They only cover problems that are extremely unlikely to happen. The health problems you are likely to have are not covered. And in my case, my preexisting situation covers all major medical conditions except for heart and liver problems. So they won’t even bother giving me coverage. And I’m actually pretty healthy. I get a regular checkup with full blood and liver panels (pay cash), and they say I’m quite healthy for a man my age, except for one weird thing: I seem to have the liver of a young child. Given the amount of alcohol I regularly consume, not being cirrhotic is nothing less than a miracle. But having a perfectly healthy liver for a child, that’s stunning to say the least. Doctors ask me how I do it, and I explain that I drink lots of whiskey and eat fatty foods. And they think that’s a joke, but it’s not. They also note that I have low blood pressure, but not dangerously low. They simply can’t believe I have trouble getting insurance. Then I explain my family’s history, and they understand. Then I tell them to feel my neck. Then they usually are so stunned they are ready to quit the profession. And I already know their question: how do you even walk? I wish I had an answer for that. I guess it’s just dumb luck. And if they saw the X-ray, they wouldn’t even believe it’s mine. If I had a choice, I certainly wouldn’t cover me for anything but heart disease and liver problems, the only problems I will never face. As for what I will face, who knows? But I’ll find out in five years as long as I don’t mess up my neck again. Next time I do that, I’ll be lucky to be a quadriplegic. Or unlucky, as it will be. But death is more likely. But if I get through that, I’ll have some kind of cancer, I just don’t know which it will be. I’m genetically prone to so many, it doesn’t even matter. I’d just like to live until 60. With insurance, that might be possible. Without it, no way I reach 50. Hell, 45 is three years away, and I’m not sure I’ll last that long. I already have a disease that cannot be diagnosed and doesn’t show up on any test. I appear healthy, but my brain feels like it’s being squeezed in a vice and I can barely think. It’s “some Asian disease” they say. Yeah, that’s helpful, and you want a thousand dollars for that brilliant assessment? I had that one figured out when you couldn’t find any other disease. So I do understand why nobody wants to bet on my life. Unless they’re taking the under, but that doesn’t pay well.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:08 am
If you’re a betting man, I’d take the over at 47, but I’d take the under at 48. Unfortunately, I can’t really make the bet. What’s the point? I can’t collect if I win the under. So I’d have to take the over and try to beat it. And I guess I have so far, so maybe that’s not a bad bet. My best friend said it the best: “You know, you have no right to be alive. You should have have been dead long ago.” And he’s right, so maybe I have special odds-defeating powers that the insurance companies should consider. Or maybe my luck is about to run out. But from the insurance perspective, my dying just calls off the bet. They only lose money if I need treatment. But they just use their preexisting condition wildcard, and they always win.
October 28th, 2009 at 5:17 am
Fostert….I hope things work out for you. Maybe you can tap into that public option, if your state isn’t one of those inclined to drop it. Colorado, is it?
At my end, I’ve been able to witness first hand how the American Health Care system treats our old people. Over the last two years, due to the decline of my elderly parents, I’ve come know intimately the insides of two emergency rooms, two hospital recovery units and three rehabs. I know the ins and outs of one private nursing home, and got to know, a little bit, one VA long term facility.
Several things stand out. If it weren’t for medicare, my Mom and Dad would have been stripped of their assets in a matter of months. As it was, and is for my Mom -now in the infamous doughnut hole- it all comes down to the bills. Decisions are based on money, not health. It feels, at all times, like vultures are circling. One mistake, and your broke.
Everybody on the delivery side of the system (except in the private nursing home and rehab), cares and works hard. Even in the drab, shitty hospital affiliated rehabs, I found myself, for the most part, impressed by the effort of staff people making just above minimum wage. Special mention must be made for my Mom’s heart surgeon, who has given my brother and myself, over the last year and half, at least four or five hours of extra, off the clock, Q&A time. A very impressive man.
My brother and I went through the death panels in April at VA Hospital here in Batavia, NY. (We didn’t know they were death panels, of course, Sarah Palin hadn’t made her Death Panel speech yet). We both left the subdued meeting very impressed by the professionalism of our counsel and quite frankly, greatly relieved that we could work out beforehand most of the details. Death, after all, creates a ton of paperwork. It was nice to feel prepared.
Three months later, on the day he died, July 31, my Dad’s nurse called me about 3pm in afternoon, and said something like, “you’re Dad is sleeping. We think you should come in, because we don’t believe he’ll be waking up.” I got down there about 4 pm and no lie, between then and midnight about 20 people came in. To visit. Some vets, some nurses. Several doctors. Just to chat, or sit and hold my Dad’s hand. At 11:45 pm his breathing got -irregular. I remember looking at my phone, then the clock on the wall. Note the time, you know? And then he stopped breathing.
I informed a nurse. A doctor came in, a very nice woman. She too noted the time, was very consoling, said she liked my Dad. I signed something, said goodbye, to the living and the dead, and left. A few days later we received the official death notice. Time of death 12:01 am, Aug 1st.
I said to my brother, that can’t be, bro, Dad died at 11:46 pm, on July 31. My brother made some calls. He found out later that day, from a friend, a bureaucrat, that my Mom will be cut one last, full Social Security check for August, because my Dad “officially” died in August. How cool is that.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:16 am
fostert-
Went to bed thinking about (and being outraged about) your circumstance and realizing there are millions of similar stories out there. We’re uninsurable, too, so it really hit home.
America has become an awful, awful place since that sociopath Reagan and his minions and if we had the funds we’d get the hell out of this warmongering, terminally stupid hellhole. Way to many ignorant assholes like Al around for this country to survive.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Cool story, Max424. Sorry about your dad. And that’s tough to deal with the money issues. My mom and dad didn’t have that issue. They were covered under a Blue Cross policy written in the early 1960s. That policy was written when health care was still cheap, so it simply guaranteed anything a doctor would order. You simply can’t buy a policy like that now. But they honored it, which was really crazy. My mom had a platelet transfusion every day for her last four months. Six units, single donor, every day. That’s just absurd. If a donor donates platelets at the fastest possible rate, it takes him eight months to donate what mom went through every day. She was blowing through $20K every day. And that really shouldn’t happen. She was doomed, and the money spent on her could have saved a hundred kids easily. So my mom got a few months of pain in exchange for the deaths of about a hundred inner city kids. That’s how it works. Some people just get way too much treatment while others die because they can’t get any. And I’ll be in the latter category. Mom was in the former. And we were all angry with mom for hanging on too long. We didn’t want her to die, but we were appalled by how much futile treatment she got that could have gone to somebody who really needed it. Some poor kids would have survived their stab wounds if they just had some platelets for them. But those platelets went into mom’s arm, not theirs. So they both died. If mom were even remotely lucid, she’d have understood that issue and tried to save other people’s lives instead. But she wasn’t lucid, despite what the hospital said. They had her signing forms when she couldn’t even remember her own name. But she was a white woman with money, so she gets treated. And a black kid with no money dies for it. Literally. And maybe that kid was a gangbanger, or maybe he was stabbed because he wasn’t. Either way, that kid’s mother loved him and didn’t want to see him die. I loved my mother, but it was her time long before they gave up. And I had to walk down the halls of that hospital and look at the grieving mothers of kids who’s life could have been saved by the treatment my mother got. How’s that make you feel? I wanted to comfort those mothers, but what would you say? My doomed mother is worth more than your child? Apparently so, but nobody either wants to hear or say that. But it was true then, and is true now.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:04 am
“We’re uninsurable, too, so it really hit home.”
Good luck to you. My situation isn’t as bad as it sounds. I’ve lived one hell of a life, and I’ll die satisfied if I drop dead now. Yes, there are still places I’d like to go, but maybe next life. And when I die, all the money that’s left goes to an education fund for Tibetan refugees. Some kids will get to go to school, and that’s wonderful. Out of death comes life. It’s not so bad for me because I have no children to worry about. The only children I have are those I’ve put through college and those I will put through college. And except for one of them, I have no idea who they are. But if you have children of your own, the situation is much worse. The one person I put through college who I’ve actually met is like a son to me. I’d do anything for him, and already have. But a real child, I just can’t imagine what that’s like.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:21 am
[...] Joe’s jibberish on the public option To my mind, Matthew Yglesias has offered the most succinct criticisms of Holy Joe’s jibbering rationale for opposing a [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 9:31 am
fostert- the last thing I would ever accuse you of is wallowing in self-pity. Your matter-of-fact presentation was pretty stoic in my book.That’s why it was so powerful.
I’m not afraid to die, but that’s beside the point. It’s the utter injustice of it all. In a nutshell, many are in similar circumstances just because this country has been so heavily propagandized by conscienceless capitalists that empathy and social good are all communist or socialist plots to destroy from within, yet they are the masters of destruction- they are also the polluters of the air we breath, the poisoners of water we drink, and the instigators of war and strife in lands where they never set foot in- all in the name of freedom and democracy. They are parasites bent on killing off the host and moving on to their next intended victim.
They are not conservative or even republican. They are sick, twisted, and I hope one day they reap what they sown. If their heads are displayed on pikes one day, it will be their own making.
And yes, I do have children.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:36 am
It’s possible that Lieberman is being truthful in service of a higher dishonesty, to hopefully trick some confused people into supporting the right bill for the wrong reasons.
Maybe it’s as though he’d vowed to filibuster any bill that creates death panels. Of course he would. But the bill doesn’t create any. So he could still vote for it, not break the promise, and woot! 60 FTW!
October 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I’m not sure that Lieberman actually needs a fully integrated worldview which passes muster with the progressive community to prosper as a senator. As I recall, he won election in 2006 drawing mostly Republican votes.
Lieberman, like the Republicans in the Senate, is attempting to maximize his own political clout. In a purely majority run institution, neither he, nor McConnell, McCain or Vitter, nor Bayh, Landrieu or Nelson would have a significant impact on the outcome of this legislation. But with a reflexive supermajority threshhold, Lieberman can trade his vote for seniority, committee chairmanships and so forth. And my guess is that even at 62 or 63 senators the Democrats would have a subcaucus of “moderates” who’d ask to be bought off to provide cloture.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Andrew @39: In a purely majority run institution, neither [Lieberman], nor McConnell, McCain or Vitter, nor Bayh, Landrieu or Nelson would have a significant impact on the outcome of this legislation. But with a reflexive supermajority threshhold, Lieberman can trade his vote for seniority, committee chairmanships and so forth. And my guess is that even at 62 or 63 senators the Democrats would have a subcaucus of “moderates” who’d ask to be bought off to provide cloture.
This reminds me a lot of the Holy Roman Empire, where the elected monarch would have to buy off the votes of the electors. What ought to have been the strongest state in Europe was instead a sclerotic, moribund-for-centuries basket of disunity. Maybe time to start calling Holy Joe “Prince-elector Count Palatinate of Stamford”.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
What does Joe really want. Clues: United Technologies Corp black hawk helicopters built in CT. Israel could use US “aid” for buying black hawk helicpoters built in CT.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
To believe that the “public option” will reduce health care costs is just silly. Has Medicare reduced any costs–NO! To reduce costs, we can either reduce demand for health care or increase the supply of health care provision. Is there anything in the bills being considered that does anything substantive on supply or demand?
Well, we are going to increase the number of people eligible and reduce their cost of access by subsidizing their purchase of “insurance”. No decrease in Demand.
By making “community pricing” a requirement, we will not make costs of health care aligned with the risks of needing health care, basically subsidizing the most needy. An increase in Demand
By making “guaranteed issuance” a mandate, we will incentive out of purchasing insurance before having health insurance BEFORE getting ill or injured. The penalty for not having insurance is much less than the cost, so if one feels lucky, why buy insurance when one doesn’t need it. An increase in Demand.
So far, NO decreases in Demand.
No mention of subsidizing health care providers or the medical community, so no increase in Supply, More likely, applying Medicare rates of reimbursement will drive out supply, doctors will retire, hospitals will close due to lower cost competitors driving them out, the reduced financial rewards in medicine will send the best and brightest elsewhere. Can you say, “Wall Street”?
Pharmaceutical and Medical supply companies will have reduced incentives to experiment and develop new methods of that might reduce costs.
No increase in Supply.
The whole, sorry tale, is increased costs, decreased availability and more Government control of our lives. When “reform” fails, everyone here will be screaming for MORE government interference to fix the problems government created.
BULLSHIT, pray for Lieberman to prevail, he doesn’t need to be re-elected next year, either.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
[...] Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias piling on as [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 4:43 am
It’s not about supply and demand. Just about every economist will tell you that there is no free market in health care, and using a free market analysis is completely wrong headed.
Besides, advocating for a free market approach in healthcare is tantamount to saying “If you are sick and poor, you die.”
This is a barbaric philosophy. In the late 19th Century, between 30 and 60 million people died from famine. The sad thing is that there WAS enough food to feed everyone. People were dying outside of granaries filled with food. Instead it was a toxic mixture of of the writings of Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer which lead to these deaths. Free market capitalism is responsible for more deaths than the NAZIs and Communists combined. Everywhere Capitalism goes, it leaves bodies behind.
Approximately one sixth of our GDP goes to health care. I simply cannot accept the notion that we lack the resources to provide a basic level of health care for everyone. Every civilized nation in the world provides health care for everyone, at a far lower cost. That the U.S. does not, simply means we are not a civilized nation.
As was the case with their 19th century counterparts, current free market fanatics are responsible for the murder of over 20,000 people per year.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] like it! Matt Yglesias, would you care to put a ring on it? It’s also worth emphasizing that while only the House-style public option will save a lot of [...]
November 1st, 2009 at 1:37 pm
First Foster: wow! You really bring out some serious points! And I have to say I agree with you, even though I am normally a non-violent person, I definitely see your points!.
Now, for those of your whose brian capacity is so small as to not to be able to understand the concept of a non-profit health insurance program competing with the greedy for-profit insurance program, here goes another try: Instead of calling the Public Option as public option, how about calling it a Generic Health Insurance Plan (aka public plan) that would be created to compete with the Brand-name Health Insurance plans already in existence (aka private health insurace).
Now most people know that generic brands are less expensive because they don’t have all the frills and expensive brand-name middlemen to drive up their cost. Generic brands exist in the pharmaceutical sector, clothing, food, household items, etc. There are generic equivalents to say Tylenol, they are just called Acetaminophen–but they have the same ingredients at the brand name Tylenol and are usually way less expensive than the brand name Tylenol.
So, the bogus argument that a Generic Health Insurance plan would drive the Brand-name Health Insurance industry out of business is as ridiculous as claiming that the Generic version of Tylenol drove Tylenol off the market. Americans are brand-name snobs, and as such, often choose to pay more money for the same product just because they love buying brand-name products. Generic products have been around for a long time, and they haven’t driven any brand-name product out of the market. The private insurance industry just wants to be lazy and greedy and keep the entire market share to themselves.
Insurance subsidies for people who can’t afford to pay for their own insurance will exist regardless of a Generic Health Insurance plan or not. It will cost Americans less on subsidies if these subsidies cost less though the Generic plan rather than paying high subsidies for brand-name insurance plans. Those of you opposing the Generic Health Insurance plan (aka Public Option) are shooting yourselves in the foot, because if it does not exist, you will be paying more on the subsidies we pay out for those who are unable to afford private heatlh insurance (brand-name insurance.
Now think of what was said here: If you are a prisoner, you are guaranteed free health care for as long as you are a prisoner–this includes the thousands of so called “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo and elsewhere. And that’s fine. Yet everyday people who work hard don’t have that same right. Thank about that. If health care was not a basic human right, we would not be providing health care to our millions of prisoners. Get it now???
November 1st, 2009 at 3:12 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias points out, Joe Lieberman can’t do math and neither can the reporters covering him: It’s also worth emphasizing that while only the House-style public option will save a lot of [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
[...] Last week, Joe Lieberman may have put the nail in the coffin of the public option, a public option that had already pretty much been watered down by allowing the states to “opt out” of the plan. If we leave it up to Lieberman, there won’t even be an up or down vote on health care reform. He has decided to join the GOP filibuster. Here is Lieberman’s twisted logic: [...]