The Obama health plan envisions an alternative to employer-based health insurance, called a health insurance Exchange. Premiums would be community-rated, people could choose a new plan once a year and the out-of-pocket premium would be limited to be no more than, say, 10% of income.
Some Democrats in Congress insist that one of the options offered in the Exchange be a public plan (e.g., Medicare for nonseniors). A Lewin Group report estimates that 32 million people would lose their private coverage and enroll in the public plan if it paid Medicare-level reimbursements and eligibility were limited to the small firms, self-employed and individuals. The number of people dropping private coverage and enrolling in the public plan would increase to 119 million people if eligibility were open to everyone.
Devon, you are surprised? Crowding out the private sector is the whole idea.
Most of the Democrats in Congress believe in a single payer system, i.e., national health insurance — what we used to call socialized medicine. So obviously they would like to see everybody in one government plan.
Given the strong possibility that Democrats will succeed in passing a health package, might it not be worthwhile to rank the likely components of said package according to desirability/undesirability? This might eventually be useful in terms of “picking our battles” if a general holding action becomes impossible.
The Senate Republican Party Committee has produced a good summary of the case against government-run, “public” health insurance plans competing against private health care plans:
http://rpc.senate.gov/public/_files/032409GovernmentRunHealthInsurance.pdf
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