Since 2008 continued...
The health insurance companies said they were on board and offered to cut costs by billions over the next few years. The ads that helped defeat the Clinton Plan featuring ultra-normal Americans Harry and Louise were rewritten so those two icons of logic on the matter, that many Americans took as gospel, changed their conclusions and supported the Obama initiative.
The public option, a government run program that would compete with private insurers, was a foregone conclusion. It appeared that the insurance companies and like stakeholders either had no problem with that or intended somehow to scuttle it. The windfall for insurers was and still is 40 million new customers, many young and healthy, who would be required to buy insurance. At a point it looked like the Senate bill would lower the Medicare age to 50 leaving the Nation’s most healthy to the insurers but that provision has not made it into any current legislation.
2009
Eventually the concept of healthcare reform including a public option met with the same resistance, most notably in the Senate, that the Clinton plan met. There was no shortage of dismal scenarios developed and made public to persuade Americans from supporting the public option specifically. It worked for a while as polls showed support for the public option dwindling from near 70% to just below 50%.
The public option fell surrounded by ads and claims that the program would break the national bank, would leave healthcare decisions up to faceless government bureaucrats, and would make ailing seniors appear before a death panel that would decide their fate and, again, the overbearing cost. But as the CBO caught up with the Senate bill it appeared that the bill would not break the bank but rather could, if all went well, reduce the deficit over ten years by $81 billion and continue to reduce the deficit in smaller amounts thereafter.
Probably the most salient and to the point comment came from Senator Grassley (R-IA) who was quoted in the Washington Post that such a program would kill the health insurance industry. He is correct and that reason alone has been the driving force behind the content of the bills, the money pouring into Washington to influence legislators, and the content of Internet-based and major media advertising from the opposition. Insurers have a lot to lose if pitted against a public option. It appears they don’t intend to give up easily.
In September-October 2009 Congress found the polls growing in favor of a public option again. The House bill includes that option and the Senate thus far has said it will include it but will leave it up to the States to decide if they wanted it.
It should be noted that signing healthcare reform into law does not automatically open the door to the proposed options. The federal government alone will have at least a year’s work rewriting regulations and pushing through necessary legislation governing Social Security and IRS changes. If the Senate proposal to leave the public option up to the States, the matter will drag out for another year or two as insurers, well seated in some states, will continue spending for advertisements and lobbying throughout the country.
The House had produced a bill fairly quickly, HR 3200. There is a bill on the legislative shelf for almost two years, HR 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-IL). Conyers chairs the House Judiciary Committee. His bill would provide preventive and all medical care without charge to all Americans. Out the window went preexisting conditions provisions on coverage, decisions prohibiting one treatment or the other based on some actuarial bottom line. Essentially, out the window under Conyers went the health insurance industry. The bill prohibits it from offering the same coverage, incorporates the thousands of insurance company workers involved in Medicare and the industry in general, provided two years of unemployment and retraining for those who are no longer needed, and paid for the whole thing with a 3% increase in the payroll tax and possibly a tax on stoke market investment profits. Conyers had gathered over 90 cosponsors for HR 676, but the bill was never offered to the public as an option.
It has been clear from the beginning of this round on healthcare reform that the bill would come out of the Senate. Max Baucus (D-MT) was in the hot seat because the bill would involve the IRS and his Finance Committee was charged with legislation of that nature.
As public demand for a public option rose over the Summer of 2009, the House included such an option in its newest bill. The option returned us to the trepidation-laced ads.
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