Hacker says that public option/private exchange would EXPAND private insurance market

by Don McCanne, MD - PNHP’s official Blog: ""

Offering a public plan option within a market of private health plans has been one of the more controversial proposals during the current national dialogue on health care reform.

The opponents of the public option, especially the private insurance industry and the Republican members of Congress, insist that a government-sponsored plan would be an unfair competitor and drive the private insurance industry out of business. Theoretically, the government would do this by extracting unfair concessions from the health care providers, pricing the public option at a lower level than the private insurance sector could ever meet. (This ignores the more important evidence such as the demonstrated greater efficiencies of our public Medicare program when contrasted with the private Medicare Advantage plans.)

The supporters of a public option, especially the progressive community, contend that the public option would be a superior product made more affordable by reducing administrative inefficiencies. They contend that competition would motivate a massive shift to the public option, bringing us much closer to the single payer model that many in the progressive community prefer. (Much has been said about why this approach actually sacrifices most of the single payer advantages and would likely never lead to a single payer system.)

Professor Jacob Hacker of the University of California at Berkeley (and formerly at Yale) has been a leading proponent of reform based on a national insurance exchange of private plans with the addition of a public plan option. And what does he have to say about the impact that a public plan option would have on market share for the private health plans? He says that under his proposal, “more Americans have private insurance after reform than do before — either through their employer or through the new national insurance exchange.”

Get That? Even with a Medicare-like public plan option, the market for the private insurers will expand! That is the real tragedy of this debate over a public plan option. It has led us away from the debate we should be having instead: an affordable single payer national health program for everyone, versus expansion of our over-priced, inequitable, and inefficient system of financing health care through private plans and public programs

Forget about the public plan option! Let’s get rid of the private health plans, and go with single payer!