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Health Care ‘Co-Ops’: Strategy for Killing Real Health Care Reform |
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U.S. House and Senate health care reform bills that have won committee approval contain a public health insurance option as a vital component and that, says a new report released this morning, “is considerable cause for celebration.”
The report’s author, Yale University professor Jacob S. Hacker, also warns that efforts to push health care cooperatives, which recently have been floated as an alternative to a public option, are meant
“to kill the public plan and, with it, the prospect of an effective competitor to consolidated insurance companies that have too often failed to provide affordable health security.”
The report, commissioned by the Institute for America’s Future, details how a strong public health insurance plan is critical to successfully achieving the goals of health reform—lower costs, higher quality and guaranteed health security for all Americans.
A public health insurance plan option would allow working families to keep their current employer-provided coverage or, if they have no insurance, choose between a private plan and a public plan that offers quality care. Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
A quality public health insurance option is a crucial part of health care reform to keep private insurance companies honest, hold down costs and ensure that everybody has a health care choice available.
The House bill (H.R. 3200), approved by three committees, and the Senate version (The Affordable Health Choices Act, no bill number yet) passed by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, both call for a public plan option, but contain some differences in the way such a plan would operate.
However, leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, which has yet to produce a bill, have dropped support for a public plan option and endorsed health care co-ops-yet provided few details of how the co-ops would operate.
Hacker, who calls the co-ops cop-outs, says:
There is absolutely no reason to think that cooperatives of any sort could achieve the three crucial goal that a competing public plan must accomplish—provide a backup option offering health and financial security to individuals without employer coverage, a cost and quality benchmark, and a cost-control backstop that drives payment and delivery system reform.
The report, Public Plan Choice in Congressional Health Plans, examines the differences in the legislation and finds there are three “crucial provision” that would ensure a public options can compete on level playing field with the private insurance industry, produce cost savings and provide broad coverage.
- Medicare “tie-in” that allows the public plan to develop a broad national provider network with competitive payment rates quickly;
- Creation of a competitive exchange that can give a range of business, as well as uninsured Americans, access to the public plan and regulated private insurance options; and
- Providing the public plan with enough authority to reduce medical inflation through drug-price bargaining and innovations in the financing and delivery of care.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—most of whose members have said they will not support a health care reform without a public option—puts it this way:
The public option is central to healthcare reform. Real reform, which lowers costs and ensures all Americans get the quality, affordable healthcare that they deserve, cannot be accomplished without a robust public option.
Click here to read the full report.
We at the AFL-CIO have come out strongly for a public health care option. Sweeney said this week that a public option is
the only way to force real competition on the insurance companies is a strong public plan option.
Appearing on the Rachel Maddow show, the Ed Schultz radio show and CNBC this week, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka warned members of Congress that if they want workers’ votes, they need to support a public option.
Click here to see his full CNBC interview where he also discusses the campaign to win health care reform, the “Big Lie” campaign by opponents of reform and how lawmakers who vote against a pubic option could lose support of union voters.
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The only way this country is going to have real, positive change is to create a third party. Republicans and Democrats are opposite sides of a counterfit coin.
You are right: co-ops are not the answer in this situation. I have spent most of my long career serving food co-ops, housing co-ops, credit unions and other co-ops. When I lived in Seattle, I was a member of Group Health Cooperative, which has done an excellent job for 62 years. But to set up a number of new health co-ops as Republicans suggest is to create weak and struggling organizations which would be targets for the muscular insurance industry. They would pick them off one by one, devoting their public relations staff to the job. Then they would point to the wreckage they will have created and shout, “Look, see! It won’t work. Only we can do the job.” It is a sucker’s game. We must not fall for it.
What a load of you know what.
AFL-CIO hierarchy and their Change-to-Win cohorts took a dive on true health care reform before they even entered the ring. The large majority of union members support HR 676, single payer health care. And in true bureaucratic fashion, the ranks were ignored. “Leadership” retreated to a concept called a public option. They did so for several possible reasons: they are ideologically-challenged, they care more about keeping their friends in Congress and in corporate circles happy than they care about serving their own ranks-and-file, or else they are downright scared. Personally, I think it is a combination of all three.
HR 3200 bears no semblance to the original, flawed “public option”. HR 3200 is much, much worse. They want us to support a “public option” but they haven’t got the guts to tell us that they pulled a bait and switch on us. The so-called public option in HR 3200 would deliver more victims into the hands of private insurers, and would use public funds to subsidize premiums. We should all be in favor of helping people out, but we most assuredly should oppose using public funds to make for-profit insurance companies richer.
For more details on the bait and switch go to: http://www.pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-“public-option”-was-sold/
Republicans are the party of just say no, but most Democrats are spineless or beholden to the medical-profits industry. Either way, unless we demand real reform, working class America will get shafted. Unless we have the gumption to advocate for ourselves, the Town Hall loonies who are unwittingly carrying the water for the very same medical-profits industry that has been screwing them and all the rest of us will win.
The answer is HR 676, single payer. It would deliver health care justice! Nothing but justice is acceptable!
The good doctors at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) are doing a great job in giving us lay people the inside, professional scoop about the politics of medicine and health care. If you want to read the article cited by Rich at the PNHP site, here is the real URL:
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/bait-and-switch-how-the-%e2%80%9cpublic-option%e2%80%9d-was-sold/
You will have to copy it into the clipboard and paste it into the address bar of your browser. If you have trouble doing that, go to the page that has the link to the blog post on it.
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/20/
Sites like the this AFL-CIO blog get me fired up. Then I go to sites like PNHP.ORG and get my talking points. When I’ve got all my ducks in a row, I seek out anti-health-care cranks and debate them! People’s minds are being changed every day by hearing the truth from people they know and trust. That’s you, brother, and you, sister. Being on the right side is only half the battle. The other half is convincing those on the other side.
The only kind of health care that makes sense is a nationalized plan under workers control. Most of the industralized world has a nationalized plan and many have them for a century or more. The reason this country has the insurance companies, pharmacy houses and other “health” industry providers controlling the health care of Americans is because the two capitalist parties protect their own. The Democrats act like they are going to get the population something but then cave-in to the same folks who give money to both the Democrats and Republicans. They put on an act much like most of the labor bureaucrats put on when they talk about getting you something in a contract only to cave-in to the first threat by management when a fight is imminent.
Remeber it is a bloody fact that in this country to eliminate chattel slavery took a Civil War of mass propotions that amounted to the 2nd American Revolution. Now you expect the party of the slavocracy, the Democrats, to get health care reform. How obscene. Like stated above we need another political vehicle and this one should be controlled by the producers of the wealth not the parisitical manipulators of it. One of the main pillors of any such party would be nationalized health care for all under workers’ control. This will take a 3rd American Revolution to bring to frutation so any party we build must be steeled with proven leadership and with a revolutionary program. To expect the present pack of misleaders of the AFL-CIO or Change To Win to be in that leadership is to expect a health insurance CEO to give-up their massive salaries and obscene profits.
It will take a struggle to build a workers party and a revolution to get nationalized health care which is what we need. Anything else is prostering or oppurtunism.
And you really want the government more involved . . . oh yeah, that’s a good idea!
For all those who may have missed it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcyc77eXpuI
Before I was terminated I worked 22.5 hrs/we @$9.50/hr. Now I cobra my insurance and am paying $626/mo for medical/dental & vision coverage. I was not able to save a penny when I was working, how am I supposed to pay $626/month while I’m laid off? Soon I will give up my insurance; after I get my teeth cleaned, eyes examined, pap smear and mamogram.