Meanwhile, with a "mandate" herd of cash cows on the national horizon, the health insurance industry is licking its chops. The corporate glee is ill-disguised as the Obama administration pushes for legal mandates to require that Americans buy health insurance -- no matter how dismal the quality of the coverage or how unaffordable the "affordable" premiums turn out to be for real people in the real world.
The mandates would involve "diverting additional billions to private insurers by requiring middle class Americans to purchase defective policies from these firms -- policies with so many gaps and loopholes that they currently leave millions of our insured patients vulnerable to financial ruin," says a letter signed by more than 3,500 doctors and released last week by Physicians for a National Health Program.
But what about "the public plan" -- enabling the government to offer health insurance that would be an alternative to the wares of for-profit insurance firms? "Under pressure from industry and their lobbyists, the public plan has been watered down to a small and ineffectual option at best, if it ever survives to being enacted," says John Geyman, professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington.
A public plan option "would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers' dominant role," according to the letter from 3,500 physicians. "Even a robust public option would forego 90 percent of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a healthcare marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care."