Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I know! Why don't we combine all three snowballs-for-Satan and propose card-check health insurance?

Opie compares single-payer (Conyers [and now Sanders also, in the Senate]) to the public-option plan (Stark) and finds them pretty much to be a choice between Coke and Pepsi. He grandly opines, "Is there a serious difference here? I doubt there is, in the long run -- given a choice, a la Stark, the citizenry will gradually opt for uncle's medicare system, obviously." He further declares that the only reason to campaign for Conyers is that it would increase the chances for the passage of . . . Stark!

In fact, there is a serious difference here: the public option plan is just another corrupt sop to the private insurers, one that is so fraught with hazards to the public sector that it could make the public plan less competitive and thus wreck prospects for single payer.

The problem is that under such a hybrid system, the private insurers could attract the healthiest, youngest population, saddling the public plan with the oldest, sickest, most expensive cases and thus rendering it uncompetitive. The whole benefit of single payer is precisely that it gathers all the participants equally in the same risk pool so that the healthiest are paying for the sickest--that key efficiency of risk pooling would be lost in a public/private hybrid plan.

In the words of Rose Ann DeMoro, head of the California Nurses Association, "The insurance companies will always be able to lower their prices with cut rate plans with lower standards that they can aggressively market through massive advertising, tele-marketing, even door to door salesmen (as some do now) with a marketing campaign that the public plans will not have the funding to be able to match.

"The private plans can then continue to cherry pick the younger and healthier patients while the sicker and older patients are dumped in the public plan, wrecking the whole idea of a risk pool and driving up the costs for the public plan to operate. The competition won't starve the private plans and cause them to wither away, they'll starve the public plan."

Moral of this story: every time Opie ventures beyond the opaque frivolities of his prose poems and into the prose of concrete economic policy analysis, he falls on his face--in this case with his shilling for the benefits of Plan B for the HMOs! Gee, thanks, Opie, but we have Obama and his paid flacks to handle that--they don't need you to peddle this flim-flam for free.

Notwithstanding the elaborate rhetorical swirls with which Opie attempts to conjure an aura of expertise, only minimal scrutiny is needed to discern the clueless, huffing and puffing fraud lurking behind the curtain of verbal finery.

snowballs-for-Satan ???

beware adverse selection ...

md
card check health care...
i count two snow balls
where's the third snow ball ???

self selected opt out ???
wouldn't blame it

I actually find myself in some sympathy with Van's line of argument (minus the red-faced indignation). It's hard for me to see how any approach that leaves any role for corporate insurance can possibly be any good. But I'm open to persuasion.

I did some web prowling after Owen's post went up. It's very hard to figure out just what the substantive provisions of the various plans are -- every account I could find is a view from geosynchronous orbit. Would somebody more knowledgeable than me undertake to tell us about the nuts and bolts?

Michael--
The point is that the inclusion of HMOs in the hybrid plan is not only not good--for the reasons state in my previous post, it might end up discrediting and sabotaging the idea of single payer by gaming the whole business to the disadvantage of the Medicare plan.

For Opie to equate the single-payer and hybrid plans as pretty much equivalently good is simply preposterous. Moreover, it's odd that a leading poster on a blog dedicated to the deconstructing the Democratic Party is parroting the same line of argument as the pro-HMO New Democrats now at the helm in the White House.

mjs

the adverse selection line
is bogus

medicare can always offer the lowest set of rates does now
and will...if allowed to ...
the pri sec right now
needs and gets a subsidy
to compete in as much as it does
with uncle's outfit

the issue is corporate control of the legislation process
obviously
and that could frig up single payer too
since private insurance
will still co exist with it

oh lord is this a bore
i like your suggestion find some wonk ready to gibber on this
problem
if the soul selected has an ideologians heart
or such a loathing for pri sec ops or such a likeing for same
the tilt might only be obvious to the deeply involved

prolly better to let sides contend
as with comparative pollution abatement methods

the fear and /or loathing of
a continued pri sec alternative
is a matter of inferior more costly
lemon capitalism type path
not different destinations

to clarify the stark plan is do able
the conyers plan is not

the slow bleed allows the pri sec a protracted
interval
protracted and extendable

but the cost of the entire health sector
is enough even with single payer
to leave most of the heavy lifting
still undone
a vickrey lerner collander type mark up market
for the sector would allow immediate cost controls
i'd rather see strak and that in fact
then conyers and a free pricing health zone

in fact the feds prolly need to pull some supply side stops out too

free immigration of med profs
fast track licensing would be a start
plus redefining the task sets and required credentials

brake the sectorsself spawn draculas
drip on the national blood bank
---is that a hybrid phrase ???
part figure part literal---

the medicare system is gamed right now

and still delivers a cheaper product
in fact if some hybred actually allowed lower priocing to youth
that would only be a justice i supported
right now
uiniversalization as is contemplated
is among other horros
a tax on youth as a group
a group that obvously would be
net payers in not net benes out

no mas
this is really
the sort of amateur hour floundering i detest

my point was class political not economic

the shining example of a majority desire
single payer
easily thwarted and right in front of our eyes
by a bevy of
corporate and professional association lobyists

http://www.allhealth.org/BriefingMaterials/1010_Collins_cong_hlt_care_bills-611.pdf

try this hair shirt on for size

a non trot statement on adverse selection

""the attempt to cover everyone through a mixed private-public system results in an inexorable death spiral for the public plans because of adverse selection. As the private insurers avoid and the public plans attract the sick and the poor, the voters, most of whom have private insurance, refuse to pay the rising costs of the public plans. It appears, therefore, that so-called political “realism” is leading health reformers to eschew or abandon single payer and espouse a reform plan that will end up as a reaffirmation of the status quo"

note
state plans state tax bases

private plans have rear areas without pub comp
in all states without state plans

this arg though worth considering

fails when uncle becomes the sponsor not state gub

for reasons similiar to
the reasons for the fed role in medicaid right now states alone can't hack the load

the key trick here seems to be
the pri sec covered majority
has corporate participation in premium payments
so full premium costs are
not compared by company covered employees

the hidden ball trick strikes again

the pub p[lan looks to pri covered folks as
a tax they pay like welfare

but uncle can simply over power these tricks
by offering up front a straight plan to every one
exactly like medicare

make the pub choice
cheaper for the employer
than the pri sec plan
and the employer will get out
get the point here
the employer will dump out of his share
in the payments plan with a higher cost to him
once the option presents itself

could uncle take a dive on this
of course ??

the point seems simple enough
if uncle permits a dive on this
as now on the medicare advantage plan
uncle won't even pass single payer
any more then card check as md points out

none of this changes my view
" org for single payer option now "

confused eager to refute minds
not withstanding

OK, it's official. Opie has become a full-fledged New Democrat, Corporate Democrat, member of the DLC. How else to account for his voluminous regurgitation of all the Baucusite-DLC-style sophistry AGAINST single-payer and FOR a public-private hybrid plan? (the plan favored precisely by the private insurers as their fallback position!) Opie is now a self-appointed shill for some of the scummiest capitalists in the world--those HMO execs and stockholders who purchase their BMWs at the expense of the ill-health and death of tens of millions of Americans with zero or inadequate medical coverage.

First, let's appraise this little gem from Opie:
"to clarify the stark plan is do able
the conyers plan is not."

Wow! Since when has SMBIVA become the echo chamber for White House/DLC agitprop? This is exactly the tired old argument advanced year after year by the corporate puppets in Washington--"single payer is not politically feasible." And what does "feasible" mean in this K-Street-speak, so ably parroted Opie, the HMOs' lobbyist here at SMBIVA? (I hope that AHIP is at least paying you well to peddle this crap, Opie! It means that Congress and the White House have been so thoroughly bought off by AHIP that they're not about to bite the hand that feeds them.

Outside the universe of DLC/MSM mendacity that that Opie now inhabits, single payer is, of course, eminently feasible politically: fully 60 percent of Americans support it (latest Gallup poll on this question) along with the majority of American physicians (according to a survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine--both sources available at www.pnhp.org). But Opie, like Obama/Pelosi/Baucus, has decided become enamored of the K-street wisdom that feasibility is a matter not of what most Americans want but what corrupt politicians--and Opie--are determined shove down their throats, like it or not. None of that activist tribune-of-the-people stuff for Opie--his political "wisdom" is now at one with the corroded cynicism of the bribers and the bribed. I guess we should call Opie's politics Carnegie Socialism--let the public be damned.

Opie's rambling, scattershot "analysis" of the issues is by turns incomprehensible, daft, and grossly ill-informed. The first big laugher is Opie's uncritical posting of the Commonwealth/Lewin comparative evaluation of various health-care reform proposals--a skewed procorporate analysis that . . . does not even include single payer!!!! This is just to the taste of the DLC/Opie/hybrid crowd--the best way to deal with single payer is to pretend that the option favored by most American . . . DOESN'T EXIST! This Orwellian strategy is on a par with the airbrushed photos so effectively deployed by Opie's other political hero, Stalin.

It's hardly a surprise that the Commonwealth Report joins Obama, Baucus/Pelosi, and the corporate media in "disappearing" single payer: the report posted by Opie was a cooperative venture with The Lewin Group, a health-care research and consultation outfit that is a chief outlet for corporate-funded propaganda and that happens to be a subsidiary of United Health, an HMO! (For more juicy details on Lewin, see http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/14/111912/22) Are you quite serious, Opie, in making SMBIVA a conduit for anti-single-payer corporate propaganda disguised as "research"? (Savor the Commonwealth's comical "explanation" for their omission of single payer here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/13/8135/23887/977/683458)

Opie just doesn't have a clue on this issue--SURPRISE! Aside from being badly misinformed, Opie betrays a deeply conservative and cynical political temperament that is much closer to that of the centrist ghouls in Washington than it is to any kind of leftism or progressivism--our sense of political possibility, in the Opie/DLC discourse, must be defined by the corporate-authored bills doled out by the sharpies of K Street.

Finally, Opie's all over the place on risk pooling. His attempts to refute this point are simply impenetrable smoke-blowing--his broken-line pomposity precludes any semblance of rational discourse. He has noe clue. He attempt to refute the point and then quotes a source (uncited) that confirms the argument he's supposedly opposing.

This is not a matter of "Trot" analysis--as though the head of the California Nurses Association is a "Trot"--or, for that matter, people like Russell Mokhiber, Ralph Nader, the Physicians for a National Health Plan, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, etc., etc. All ISO members, Opie? Stalinist paranoia--and stupidity--runs deep. (Even PDA types are to the left of Opie on this one--see the excellent analyses from the MD from Kos below).

If anyone wishes to dispel the fog of obfuscation and corporate propaganda blown in on Opie's last few gusts of prose poems, I will post some links in a separate comment.

If anyone wishes to dispel the fog of obfuscation and corporate propaganda blown in on Opie's last few gusts of prose poems, I suggest the following Web links:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/february/jacob_hacker_is_a_ni.php

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/january/commonwealth_analy.php

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/2/703544/-Sen.-Baucus:-Stop-Pressuring-CBO-To-Do-Phony-Accounting

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/13/8135/23887/977/683458

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/14/111912/22

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/13/8135/23887/977/683458