At the same time I'm blogging for a saner middle in our discourse, I'm extremely disappointed in the apparent fall back. A pretend competition between multi-billion dollar insurance companies and the authorization for medical cooperatives is a serious blow to health reform. The government is the only entity strong enough to provide a serious competitor to the for-profit insurance companies. I'm all for coops as another option in the exchanges, but they are not a substitute for a public option to provide competition. Without another option for people to CHOOSE, this bill will FORCE 50 million people onto the rolls of United Health, Cigna, etc. Why isn't this a meme in the media. No one seems to question the individual mandate and yet, the mandate was supposed to be accompanied by providing a public option which the uninsured could CHOOSE. Instead, without the public option, we are providing the insurance companies with 50 million new customers to gouge.
Because of a few improvements envisioned by this bill, in the system we now have, I don't want to see a bill go down to complete defeat even without a public option but I strongly disagree that this is only a sliver of the reform we were promised and therefore not all that important. Congress failed to give single payer even a minimal hearing and instead dispensed with the argument with this proposal in favor of a limited public option. Now they pretend that compromise between a limited public option and no change is the only way to get "reform". This compromise may represent a small improvement over the status quo, but it in NO way represents reform.
No comments:
Post a Comment