Reich on the Public Option

Former Clinton advisor Robert Reich argues for the necessity of a public option in health care reform on his Talking Points Memo blog.

Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.

It's been clear from the start that the private insurers and other parts of the medical-industrial complex have hated the idea of the public option, for precisely these reasons. A public option would cut deeply into their current profits. That's why they've been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama's cage to the point where the Administration is about to give up on it.

Reich argues that the non-profit cooperatives offered as an alternative would lack the size and scale to have the same effect. I think the same powerful, entrenched interests opposing the public option would find ways to co-opt and water down private cooperatives preventing them from doing their job.

I agree with Reich that Obama needs to take a firm stand on this issue. The Democrats have a 60 vote majority in the Senate and can get this done with some party discipline enforced by the President.

--Ballard Burgher