http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/07/28/does-the-congressional-progressive-caucus-care-about-its-public-option-principles/Worth revisiting this article from the summer.
"by Kip Sullivan
It has become obvious that the Democratic leadership in Congress will not fight for a large “Medicare-like” program or “public option,” to use the lingo adopted early in 2009 by advocates of this idea. As I reported in an article posted on this blog on July 20, “public option” advocates originally claimed they stood for a “Medicare-like” program that would enroll 130 million non-elderly Americans, but somewhere along the line they got comfortable selling the “public options” proposed in legislation introduced by Senate and House Democrats a few weeks ago that will, at best, enroll 10 million people....It is difficult to understand why “public option” advocates outside Congress would conceal this from the public. It is even more difficult to comprehend why members of Congress – people who actually have something tangible to lose (namely, power and a livelihood) if the “public option” turns out to be a joke – have remained silent about the degradation of the “public option.”
...The CPC’s list of criteria includes about a dozen “principles.” The principles are an odd mix. Although the letter to Speaker Pelosi repeated the “public option” proponents’ mantra that the “public option” should be “robust … like Medicare,” the criteria enunciated in the letter were far weaker than the criteria Jacob Hacker originally proposed for his version of the “public option,” a version which would have enrolled 130 million people. The CPC’s criteria refer to only one of the features of the “Medicare-like” program that Hacker called for, namely, the one calling for giving all non-elderly Americans access to the public program (as opposed to limiting access to uninsured people and employees of small businesses). Missing from the CPC list of criteria are these four features of Hacker’s original proposal:
• the public program must be pre-populated with tens of millions of
people;
• subsidies must go only to Americans who enroll in the public program;
• the program must be authorized to use Medicare’s payment rates; and
• the insurance industry must be required to offer the same benefits
the public program is required to offer.
One CPC criterion would actually reverse one of Hacker’s: The Progressive Caucus insists on paying the insurance industry the same subsidies the public program gets.
...So unless something changes, the Democrats’ bill writers have set in motion a process that will inevitably result in either no “public option” or a very weak one. And a very weak “public option” means nearly all of the $1 trillion in payments to insurers projected for the next decade will go to the insurance industry and very little will go to the “public option.” Is that what the CPC wants? ....
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