Today's Most Popular Video
Nov 23, 2009 10:59 pm US/Central
Good Question: What Is The Public Option?
(WCCO)
There are more than 400,000 words in the Senate Health Care bill, but politicians seem to mostly be talking about two of them: Public Option. But what is the public option?
"Well, I believe in it, but I'd like to know more about it," said one man in downtown Minneapolis.
"Actually, I don't know what the public option is," added a downtown florist.
At its core, "public option" is a phrase that refers to a government-sponsored and administrated health care plan.
"Instead of a private company bearing the risk of costs and coordinating things, it would be a government entity," said Jean Abraham, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
Abraham spent a year working on health policy in both the Bush and Obama White House administrations.
"You would still have a set of benefits, still be able to go to a set of providers who accept a public plan and you would still have an entity that would process your claim," she said.
Essentially, the "public option" would be similar to Medicare, except without the age and disability requirements that limit enrollment.
Under the current Senate bill, only people who aren't able to get insurance at work or employees of very small employers would be able to enroll in the public option.
The Senate version allows states to opt out of the public plan, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would have the net result of just 3 to 4 million people enrolling in it.
However, it wouldn't be free health care for the uninsured. They'd still have to pay premiums, which most auditors believe would be close to or higher than the cost of private insurance premiums. Many of the uninsured won't be able to afford it, even with grants and aid that the health reform bill provides.
"That's partly due to political concessions in the bill, they basically gave away the farm when they were writing the bill," said Abraham.
So why are we spending so much time talking about the public option when it's not going to affect a huge number of people?
"Because people see it as a symbol of an ideological debate over how much of a role government should play in the financing and delivery of our health care system," she added.
"Private insurers don't worry about the beginning. They're worried about the expansion of the program, that eventually their market position will erode crowding them out," said Abraham.
Over time, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have the authority to expand the pool of people eligible to sign up for the public plan, expanding it to larger employers.
As the number of participants grows, the buying power of the public option grows, making it cheaper to join. That could make it attractive for businesses to dump their private insurance plans, instead opting for the government plan.
But, for now, the new public option has to start negotiating payments to doctors from scratch. The current bill doesn't let this plan tie rates to Medicare.
"Right now, as the legislation reads, it's unlikely that it would have a lot of cost-savings potential," she said.
Of course, the public option has a long way to go until it catches up to the other forms of publicly financed health insurance.
"Right now Medicare is our best example of a public option," said Abraham.
The federal government provides insurance for 100 million Americans, she said, paying out 46 percent of every health care dollar.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Swimsuit Cover Model Forgot To Wear Top
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
Reporting
