The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The AP obtained a copy.
By contrast, an earlier, incomplete proposal carried a price tag of roughly $1 trillion and would have left millions uninsured, CBO analysts said in mid-June.
The letter indicated the cost and coverage improvements resulted from two changes. The first calls for a government-run health insurance option to compete with private coverage plans, an option that has drawn intense opposition from Republicans [emphasis added].
You would think Republicans would want to support the less-costly measure, given their insistence that the Obama administration has been spending too much. But this isn’t about what’s the most cost-effective, or what’s best for Americans. This is about defending the status quo for the benefit of health insurance companies. Newt Gingrich, for example, says the health insurance companies are doing a great job:
JOHNSON: And when the president says to the private companies, you had 30 years to prove that you can do it well and they haven’t…
GINGRICH: They have it done well. And the fact is, overall, 71 percent of Americans are relatively satisfied with the health insurance.
JOHNSON: But we have 46 million uninsured.
GINGRICH: Right. And we have — you know, that means you also have 260 million insured [emphasis added]
Wow! What a great job our health insurance companies are doing. 71 percent of Americans are “relatively” satisfied! Only 1/6 of all Americans are uninsured! I can’t imagine why we’d ever want to change that system.
You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Republicans complain about the public plan option, but they’re so fundamentally out of touch that it’s tough to take them seriously.
If the “for profit” health care operations cannot handle the task of competing with each other in order
to make it an efficient, workable & afforadable system for the American public,
then the task obviously falls to government in the form of oversight,
regulation & perhaps even competition, or replacement.
Is it so hard to grasp that government is there to serve the people & manage the well-being of the society?
So which public option are you touting?
There are two choices, and they are worlds apart in terms of viability.