Since I’ve been following pretty closely the drama over whether the final health care reform bill will have “the public option” or “health care cooperatives” (see my articles, “Reject Health Care Cooperatives -- Trojan Horse for the Public Option” and “Beware Obama's Bipartisan Compromise Strategy for Health Care Reform”), I was eager to see what the Senator Baucus-led Senate Finance Committee would come up with in their health care reform bill. Well, here we are with Baucus' "Chairman’s Mark: America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009," a 223-page PDF framework for a health care reform bill, which is scheduled for markup by the Senate Finance Committee on September 22, 2009.

First off, I was gratified to see that Baucus did what I, and a whole lot of other people, had predicted. He substituted “health care cooperatives” for “the public option” of the House bill, H.R. 3200 and the other Senate bill. This is conveniently in line with President Obama’s artful downplaying of the importance of the public option in recent weeks. In fact, if you read my article, “Beware Obama’s Bipartisan Compromise Strategy for Health Care Reform,” you’ll see that the Obama administration has been acting in their negotiations with health care industry representatives as if the public option would not be in the final bill for a few months now. Which means that President Obama has had a Plan B in place for a long time now for just such an event as the widespread opposition to a government takeover of health care via the public option in the August town halls.

Nonetheless whether or not Obama had prepared for a dramatic ditching of the public option months ago, let’s consider whether the health care cooperatives are really the public option with lipstick. To decide this you need to read closely and compare “Subtitle E -- Creation of Health Care Cooperatives” in the Baucus “Chairman’s Mark” proposal and “Division A, Title II, Subtitle B -- Public Health Insurance Option” in House bill H.R. 3200.

I won’t take the time and space for a paragraph by paragraph and line by line comparison here. In fact, I haven’t done such a detailed analysis for myself yet. However, as I’ve compared the two texts by skimming and skipping back and forth, I can see that such a detailed analysis will be fruitful. For example, in both cases it will be the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will be organizing for health care insurance that will be available in four levels of cost and coverage. In both cases, the federal government will provide startup grants and loans for these new government-sponsored health care plans. In both cases all aspects of providing these health care plans will be heavily regulated by the federal government. And, you can bet that the government regulation and subsidies would be such that private insurance companies just couldn't compete, and would be "crowded-out" as they say.

So, you might ask what’s the difference between the health care cooperatives and the public option. Well, one noticeable difference is that according to Baucus' proposal these cooperatives “must not be sponsored by a State, county, or local government, or any government instrumentality.” And, “Governance of the [cooperative] organization must be subject to a majority vote of its members (i.e., beneficiaries).” So, you see that these cooperatives will definitely not be government-sponsored by definition, but government-sponsored, government-subsidized, and government-regulated in reality. Furthermore, there’ll be precious little left for these “members” to vote on in light of the extensive government regulations of their health care cooperatives. Looks to me like the difference between cooperatives and the public option is little more than lipstick to enable congressional passage of a government takeover of the health care industry with a minimum of political backlash.

Given that Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership want to complete the government takeover of health care that was started by Medicare and Medicaid, and given that they’ll apply lipstick to their legislation to help get what they want, the best thing we can do to avoid helping them toward their unconstitutional, anti-free market goal is to tell our representatives and senators to “just drop health care reform!”
 

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dobropet said:

	... Has the healthcare industry merely been assisting it the drawup of this plan, or are they actually funding these Demorats into submission for putting this bill into the House immediatly thus curtailing the publics knowledge of these facts?
	report abuse vote down vote up

September 18, 2009
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Jim Klippert said:

	Canada health care reform My friends in Canada come to Amnerica to have their health taken care of. You want health care reform, look forward to waiting for 6 months for appointment to see a doctor who has no incentive to work. Free interprize still works.
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September 18, 2009
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