Except that not all participants will be able to pay in a public option.. hence the WANT for it...
As was the case last year, there seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion as to what a public option is. It's not Medicaid. We already have something like Medicaid--it's called Medicaid. A public option is not for the poor, people who can't afford to pay premiums--it's for anyone in the individual market who wants to buy insurance from it. Its premiums will be lower than most private plans because of the way it reimburses providers--
that's why people want it and that's where its value lies. As I explained in a post above, the point of that is to get private insurers and providers alike to put the brakes on rising premiums, lest private insurers lose customers to the public option and providers have to settle for lower reimbursements. The better the public option works, the smaller the differential in its premiums from the average private premium and consequently the less attractive it is relative to private payers (i.e. the less customers it has).
Its purpose isn't to swoop up all the customers in the market, its job is to re-shape the landscape in which payers and providers negotiate reimbursements (which ultimately determines how high your premiums are and how fast they're rising). I wouldn't have access to the public option (I'm in a employer-based plan) but I still wouldn't mind seeing it introduced because it would be an improvement to the existing health care market as a whole.
Horse shit. The government can undercut insurance companies by subsidizing the public option with tax dollars which they will do, thus putting insurance companies out of business.
Private insurers are being subsidized under the new reform law (via subsidies low-to-middle income people can spend only on premiums).
Employers will drop their employees' health insurance benefits because there is now a public "option" forcing them onto the government program no longer making it an option. Eventually, the government becomes the primary insurer and voila! Socialized health care, which is exactly what the socialists wanted in the first place. This is the logical progression of things.
An employer who dumps coverage (which, by the way, there's an employer mandate to help prevent) sends his employees into health insurance exchanges, which are full of private plans. If this new public option bill, H.R. 5808, were to pass there would then be a public plan available to people buying in the exchanges. Does the public plan steal their customers? Not if they pressure providers to stop jacking up reimbursements (something insurers have a difficult time doing now but would have significantly more leverage to do if a viable publicly plan were competing with them).
You are right on both counts.
I know one business owner right now talking to his accountant about how much more or less dumping everyone on the state and paying the fine would cost. At some point it will make sense for businesses to do this.
This is somewhat off the immediate topic, but decoupling health insurance from jobs would be a
good thing. You'd have more choice (I have no choice of insurance options through my current employer), more portability, and more competition in a single marketplace. The employer mandate--the fine--is there partially to help pay for the health care system and partly to maintain the current system as it is since people don't like abrupt change. Ultimately I'd like to see that preference for employer-sponsored insurance go away (and this is an idea many on the right--from Milton Friedman to Ron Paul--have embraced at various points).
And the argument about it being self funding is nonsense. People with no means to pay for it will be on it as well. By definition it cannot be self funding in that case.
That's not true. People with no means to pay (i.e. who are below the 133% of the poverty level threshold) will be on Medicaid, a very different beast.
You're right. Thank you. For proving my case.
The first link is from the Boston area. Recall that MA has Romneycare, which is the model for Obamacare. So of course businesses are dumping their liabilities on the gov't. Same will happen when Obamacare gets phased on. We've made that point. This just proves it.
How does a business dropping coverage dump liabilities on the government? I assume you're talking about subsidies to buy private insurance in the Connector, not actually pushing people onto a public insurer since there isn't any such thing in Massachusetts (beyond Medicaid, of course).
