too many people abandoned a not for profit HC system for the idea of a public option, then a watered down public, then no public option.
THE HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC OPTION.
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2009&base_name=the_history_of_the_public_opti"...One key player was Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future. Hickey took UC Berkley health care expert Jacob Hacker's idea for "a new public insurance pool modeled after Medicare" and went around to the community of single-payer advocates, making the case that this limited "public option" was the best they could hope for. Ideally, it would someday magically turn into single-payer. And then Hickey went to all the presidential candidates, acknowledging that politically, they couldn't support single-payer, but that the "public option" would attract a real progressive constituency. Here's Hickey from a speech to New Jersey Citizen Action in November 2007:
The good news is that people are ready for big change. But the hard reality, from the point of view of all of us who understand the efficiency and simplicity of a single-payer system, is that our pollsters unanimously tell us that large numbers of Americans are not willing to give up the good private insurance they now have in order to be put into one big health plan run by the government.
Pollster Celinda Lake looked at public backing for a single-payer plan - and then compared it with an approach that offers a choice between highly regulated private insurance and a public plan like Medicare. This alternative, called "guaranteed choice" wins 64 percent support to 22 percent for single-payer. And even the hard core progressive part of the population, which Celinda calls the "health justice" constituency, favors "guaranteed choice" over single-payer. ...
Starting in January, we began to take Jacob Hacker to see the presidential candidates. We started with John Edwards and his advisers -- who quickly understood the value of Hacker's public plan, and when he announced his health proposal on "Meet The Press," he was very clear that his public plan could become the dominant part of his new health care program, if enough people choose it..."
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/12/06/two-thirds-support-1/“Americans are scared to death of single payer.”
These words were not uttered by some foaming-at-the mouth wingnut. They were written by Bernie Horn, a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, a member of Health Care for America Now, on June 8, 2009.http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009062408/why-not-single-payer"...That brings us to the idea of a public health insurance option. If you support single-payer, the very best thing you can do is fight like hell for the public option. Just as Americans overwhelmingly want the choice to keep their existing private insurance, they also overwhelmingly want the option to enroll in a government-sponsored insurance plan."
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