http://unsilentgeneration.com/2009/10/27/public-optioncarpers-folly/
Public Option:Insurance Industry’s Trojan Horse
October 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment
As I suggested yesterday, the latest reincarnation of the public
option, endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in all
probability will lay out one more circuitous route back into the
insurance industry. The Senate plan apparently will follow the
lines of an idea originally suggested by Senator Tom Carper, a
Delaware Democrat. Today, nobody—journalists, politicans—know the
details of this plan. But earlier in October, Carper talked to
reporters and, according to an account in TPM, set forth his ideas
in some detail.
I think at the end of the day there will be a national plan
probably put together not by the federal government but by a
non-profit board with some seed money from the federal government
that states would initially participate in because of lack of
affordability…..
How would it work? First, this won’t be a government run,
government funded enterprise. Two, there should be a level
playing field so that this non-profit entity that would be stood
up would have to play by same rules basically as for-profit
insurance companies–the idea that secretary of Health and Human
Services [will be] running or directing the operation of this–no way.
We ought to have a non-profit board–it could be appointed by
the President but a non-profit board. They’d have to retain
earnings, create a retained earnings pool, so that if they run
into financial problems later on the financial needs of the plan
could be met by the retained earnings
Carper’s plan begins to sound very much like Blue Cross-Blue
Shield, long ago launched as a non-profit cooperative that over
time turned into a hellish health insurance conglomerate that
includes both for-profit and non-profit franchises. (The huge–and
hugely loathed–WellPoint is now the largest member of the network.)
Carper and other designers of weak-assed public options like to
say “non-profit” over and over again, as if this were some cure to
all the ills of the private insurance industry. This is far from
the case: As I wrote back in June:
Almost half of Americans with private health insurance are
currently covered by non-profit plans. As a whole, they haven’t
proven themselves much—if any—better or cheaper than the
for-profit insurers….The giant Kaiser Permanente is a non-profit.
And while some of them have privatized, many of the Blue
Cross-Blue Shields are still non-profits as well—and, in fact, got
started as co-ops. Some of these non-profit insurers are well
known for paying huge executive salaries and hoarding huge
reserves, while charging the same high rates and offering the same
rationed care as private plans—and enjoying tax exemption to boot.
One report by the Consumers Union found the non-profit “Blues”
stockpiling billions in cash even as they raised premiums and co-pays.
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