PUBLIC OPTION: Dean On Why The Option’s Worth Fighting For

5:05 pm EST August 19th, 2009 | News | 16 Comments

Howard Dean:

Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option would give Americans a real choice and not reward for-profit health insurers with 47 milllion new customers. Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option would cut out the administrative waste of private insurers and begin changing the way health care is delivered. Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option could adopt the kind of payment reforms that would start to “hold down long-term growth in health spending” and encourage providers to deliver care more efficiently. We know that premiums in the public option would be about 10 percent lower and that a real robust plan that piggy backs off of Medicare’s infrastructure could save us somewhere between $75 billion and $150 billion over 10 years.

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16 Responses to “PUBLIC OPTION: Dean On Why The Option’s Worth Fighting For”

  1. Jody says:
    August 19, 2009 at 5:21 pm

    Public health care is a necessity. Anything else is just denying this point.

    Lemme put it this way: You will and do pay for people who do not have health care right now. Uninsured people still get sick, and poor people still have accidents. Now, which do you prefer: 1) a $150 doctors visit for an infection that can be treated with $40 dollars worth of penicillin or 2) a $3,000 ER visit and ambulance ride?

    If you do not account for these people, you WILL be paying the more expensive option. And the insurance companies WILL pass that expense on to you. As they’ve been doing.

    Everyone but the biggest dupes on the right are aware of this. They just know they stand to make too much money off it otherwise.

  2. jr says:
    August 19, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    “I’m getting paid, bitch”-Max Baucus

  3. SaveFarris says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:14 pm

    Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option could adopt the kind of payment reforms that would start to “hold down long-term growth in health spending”

    With a vast majority of health care spending in this country dedicated to the last 3 years of life, how are we going to “hold down long-term growth” without rationing elderly care?

    Hello Death Panels!!!

  4. Jody says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:27 pm

    Absolutely. Because the only way to hold down costs will be to euthanize old people. Nevermind we have the highest spending per capita of any industrialized nation, and receive the worst care among them all. Such a system is necessary if we are to ensure only the right people get care.

    After all, far, far better to let millions of uninsured die than to cover them, as they do in every other industrialized nation. And the folks who get denied coverage after years of faithfully paying into their health programs? They understand they’re sacrifice is for the greater good. And the ones that survive, yet go bankrupt from care? They’re the greatest heroes of all, giving their all for their insurance companies and yet having the decency to remain alive that they may continue paying into the system.

    The “Death Panel” trope isn’t for gullible dupes to puke around anywhere they think they can get an audience. It’s a valuable warning! Obliter’s planning death squads for the elderly, and gay islamo-marriages for the rest of us! WAKE UP LIBS!!!

  5. Indeed says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    Hello Death Panels!!!

    We got ‘em now. They’re called insurance companies:

    “They Dump the Sick to Satisfy Investors”: Insurance Exec Turned Whistleblower Wendell Potter Speaks Out Against Healthcare Industry

    http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/16/former_insurance_exec_wendell_porter

    Once you file a claim, if you are unfortunate enough to get very sick or have an accident and file a claim, you very often will find that your insurance company will go back and look at your application to see if there might be a chance that you either didn’t disclose something that you knew about in the past or inadvertently didn’t disclose something or might not have known about a pre-existing condition. They’ll use that as evidence that you were committing fraud, and they’ll revoke your policy, or they call it “rescinding” your policy, leaving you holding the bag, making you completely responsible for all the medical bills. That’s one way that they dump people who need insurance the most.

    Another is, if you are employed, particularly with a small business, and your insurance—your employer gets his or her insurance through one of the large insurers, and if just one person in your company files a claim that the underwriters think is too high, if it skews what they think is the appropriate medical experience or claim experience, when that business comes up for renewal, they very likely will jack up the rates so much that your employer has no alternative but to leave and leave you and all of your coworkers without insurance. Either that or they may cut benefits or try to shop for coverage somewhere else. But the end result is, you may find yourself dumped into the rolls and the ranks of the uninsured.

    and

    Nataline Sarkisyan, as you know, was a seventeen-year-old girl in California when her doctors at UCLA suggested—or requested coverage for a liver transplant that was denied. That request was denied by CIGNA. And it was one of those things that became what we called a high-profile case. The Sarkisyan family reached out to the media, to the California Nurses Associations and others to help them put pressure on CIGNA to try to get the company to reverse its decision. Ultimately, the company did.

    It was a very, very difficult time for—I can’t imagine what it was like for the family. I don’t want to suggest that the difficulty that I had was anything close to what the family was going through. My heart went out to them and still does. But it was difficult to serve as a spokesman for the company during that time. And as you know, the company did make a decision to cover the procedure, but regrettably that decision came too late, because Nataline died just hours after that decision was communicated to the family.

    Read the whole thing if you still haven’t. Or is Wendell Potter like Hitler?

  6. SaveFarris says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:44 pm

    Nevermind we have the highest spending per capita of any industrialized nation, and receive the worst care among them all.

    Wrong.

  7. El Cid says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:51 pm

    But the bottom line is when you remove homicide and car crashes, we jump from number 15 with a life expectancy of 75.3 to number 1 with a life expectancy of 76.9.

    Oh, okay.

    And what happens when you do the same for all the other countries?

    I mean, if we’re going to play stat-fu.

  8. Jody says:
    August 19, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    Of course, because lord knows we couldn’t do something like decriminalize marijuana, as SF’s article advocates, AND reform health care so the entire country can get it.

    See, such plans are mutually exclusive because the resulting increases in life expectancy would cause Americans to become immortal, which would mean we’d then all have to battle to the death in pursuit of the Quickening.

    Sure, deaths from disease would vanish, but deaths from decapitation would increase a million billion percent. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT LIBS???

  9. El Cid says:
    August 19, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    Sure, deaths from disease would vanish, but deaths from decapitation would increase a million billion percent. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT LIBS???

    Well, as long as the lightning storms and exploding windows take place in abandoned warehouses in faraway locations and not near anyone’s actual house, sure, why not?

  10. Quaker in a Basement says:
    August 19, 2009 at 8:29 pm

    how are we going to “hold down long-term growth” without rationing elderly care?

    To borrow a slogan: “READ THE BILL!”

  11. Jody says:
    August 19, 2009 at 9:03 pm

    “Well, as long as the lightning storms and exploding windows take place in abandoned warehouses in faraway locations and not near anyone’s actual house, sure, why not?”

    …You’ve convinced me.

    Coincidentally I nominate Clancy Brown for Secretary of Health.

  12. abanterer says:
    August 19, 2009 at 10:04 pm

    Any man who contends that there will be ‘death panels’ is a liar.

    And I mean that specifically – liar. Not ‘mistaken’ or ‘duped’ or even ‘ignorant’. Liar.

    The requirements to maintain the ongoing fiction that any sort of agency will have the ability to demand the forced execution of any person based on infirmity or disease has made a choice to not know something that easily verifiable, and has been freely offered many times.

    And not just that, but they have chosen to not only believe this, but also believe that anyone would specifically create such an agency, which is tantamount to believing they are murderers, and specifically planning to kill people.

    The only motive for it is to feel superior for not wanting to murder disabled children and the elderly, which is like congratulating yourself for being against eating a puppy.

    That said, the people spreading this rumor should stop, because it makes them look like conspiracy theorists on par with folk who believe in the Lizard People and the Hollow Earth.

  13. jrfunkenstein says:
    August 19, 2009 at 10:33 pm

    ‘Hello Death Panels!!!’

    This sort of comment is precisely the evidence necessary to conclude that many on the Right of the political spectrum will believe ANYTHING.

    No wonder they think Reagan was brilliant and Bush was ordained by God.

  14. jrfunkenstein says:
    August 19, 2009 at 10:35 pm

    ‘Nevermind we have the highest spending per capita of any industrialized nation, and receive the worst care among them all.

    Wrong.’

    Not only is it not wrong, it’s never going to change while Republicans draw breath.

  15. PD100 says:
    August 19, 2009 at 11:16 pm

    “Not only is it not wrong, it’s never going to change while Republicans draw breath.”

    Actually a widespread case of cancer amongst the low-tooth-per-capita contingent that won’t be covered by private insurers is what I’m counting on.

    Then again, history is supposed to redeem George Bush..

  16. jrfunkenstein says:
    August 20, 2009 at 9:00 am

    ‘Then again, history is supposed to redeem George Bush..’

    Not while the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West it won’t.