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No Compromise on the Public Plan!: Why Weakening the Public Option Would Weaken the Party Responsible
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Issue
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Jun 30, 2009 06:25pm |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Phillip Cryan |
| News Date | Tuesday, June 30, 2009 04:55:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Why are all the alternatives to a robust public plan now being floated in the health care reform debate – cooperatives, state or regional plans, a “trigger” for the public plan, a public plan prohibited from bargaining with drug companies – such profoundly bad ideas?
For one simple reason: they would fail to rein in health care costs’ out-of-control growth rate.
And the effects of such a failure would very likely include not just unsustainable public budgets and the eventual collapse of universal health coverage but political calamity for the party that made the reform.
One of the greatest political opportunities in memory could be converted into lasting disaster, if conservative Democrats have their way and we get health care reform without a robust public option. Any concessions made to those Democrats – and to the handful of Republicans still playing nice, just as long as health reform doesn’t bother the insurance industry – on the public plan will prove extraordinarily costly down the road. The cost would be measured first in dollars – as suggested in my previous posts in this series (here, here, and here) – and later in votes.
If sweeping health care reform gets passed this year, irreversibly associated with Barack Obama and the Democratic Party regardless of the number of Republicans voting for it, and if a few years after that reform cost growth in health care continues at its current clip, Democrats will be in serious political trouble for a long time. |
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