"We warned the president -- don't ever, ever agree with the Republicans,"

[TheKentuckian]

178. There is no public option so I can't say what the MLR might be.

I do know before it went down for the last time the focus was on making sure for profit plans could compete with it so various scammy set ups were being batted around to balance the public option to account not only for administrative and marketing costs but it would have to adjust for profit, there was no intent to allow any advantage for a public plan to have a cost to consumer advantage but I never heard of any MLR associated with the PO.

In fact the MRL, which is a dangerous cost control that without other price controls and cost containment systems, probably will drive up systemic costs rather than reduce them. If they have to stick to a MLR then the path to profits is higher overall costs and there is absolutely no way to control this obvious out because the only MLR is on the people with the purse or in other words the exact point in the system where it doesn't make much sense. All they have to do is edge up their allowable charges, which have plenty of stretch room as they are generally well below market.
A MLR makes a hell of a lot more sense on the delivery end and doesn't work logically if you only place it on the financing end both locks it down but the important end is delivery, from there you can begin to manage cost.
As is it threatens mostly to drive up costs.
It is also a bit of a nothing because the level is set where the cartel says they are and the little refund checks seem to generally support that, the refunds are infinitesimal compared to systemic costs, probably well under 1% meaningful to individuals getting checks for a few dollars but it is not systemically meaningful.

The MRL was a 12th hour toss in to respond to deafening criticism that the measure had no cost containment and either wasn't very well thought out with no functional understanding of how the industry makes its money or was intentionally a scam.