https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/why-a-public-option-isnt-enough
Private health insurance is an unnecessary part of the healthcare system. Insurance companies are middlemen, and insurance just exists to make sure that providers get paid. It was our government’s own choice to encourage the proliferation of private insurance, through laws like the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. It was the federal government that subsidized private insurance companies and encouraged employers to use them. Other countries didn’t build this kind of healthcare system, for two reasons:
It doesn’t cover everyone.It creates a bloated, inefficient insurance bureaucracy.
Our government has always been playing catch-up trying to get more people covered. It’s created employer subsidies, Medicaid, CHIP, and the Obamacare exchanges in a desperate bid to get this system to do its job, and despite decades of piecemeal healthcare reforms 13.7 percent of Americans remain without health insurance and millions more have inadequate coverage. Offering to let Americans “buy-in” to Medicare keeps Americans paying premiums, and as long as Americans must personally pay premiums to receive healthcare there are going to be some people who can’t or won’t pay those premiums and go without. It turns Medicare-For-All into a publicly run HMO. Maintaining an employer-sponsored health insurance system means remaining in a situation where large numbers of people go through a period of being uninsured each year, because when you lose your job you lose your insurance. (Currently 1 in 4 Americans go through an uninsured period each year.) Single payer advocates ask the question: “Why have a nightmarish tangle of public and private options, varying by state, with people moving on and off all the time? Why not just pay for healthcare with taxes, cover everyone, and make it free at the point of use?”
Not only will a public option fail to cover everyone, it will do nothing to restrain the growth of healthcare costs. Single payer systems control costs by giving the health service a monopoly on access to patients, preventing providers from exploiting desperate patients for profit. If instead there are a large number of insurance companies, providers can play those insurance companies off each other. Right now, we have a two-tier system, in which the best doctors and hospitals refuse to provide coverage unless your insurer offers them exorbitantly high rents. To support that cost while still making a profit, your insurer has to subject you to higher premiums, higher co-pays, and higher deductibles. Poor Americans with poor-quality insurance are stuck with providers who don’t provide high enough quality care to make these demands. The best providers keep charging ever higher rents, and the gap between the care they offer and the care the poor receive just keeps growing. Poor Americans are now seeing a decline in life expectancy, in part because they cannot afford to buy insurance that would give them access to the best doctors and hospitals. Costs balloon for rich Americans while the quality of care stagnates for the poor.
Furthermore, we need to stop starting from a position of compromise. That's how we end up with more or less what Republicans want.
Congratulations to our presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden!
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If I were to vote in a presidential