What is being discussed?

[pecunium]

Lots of terms are being tossed about in the healthcare debate. We hear about "socialised" this and that, we hear, "single payer", and, "public option."

What to they mean? Nieman Watchdog explains it all for you

The term “single payer” describes a model of health care financing in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private. Most European countries, Canada, Australia and Taiwan have single payer systems. This is socialized insurance, in that public revenues are used to pay for the health care of all citizens, as we currently pay for other public services, such as the fire department.

Here's the thing, when all is said and done... we are already paying this, and not getting the benefits. Between Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the healthcare paidfor to federal employees, Tricare (military members, and their dependents), and the tax break for healthcare, something like 60 percent of or healthcare budget (the highest in the world) is gov't money.

That's to say, we are paying huge taxes and not getting our money's worth. Our present gov't expenditures on healthcare are more than we'd need, in a well run system, to pay for everyone to have good healtcare.

Instead we have somehing like 40 million people who have no insurance, and who knows how many more without enough insurance. We have apparatchiki in insurance companies (many of them straight out of school) deciding what gets covered; denying treatment to make money.

Trading lives for profit.

We can do better. We must do better. If we don't want to collapse into a mess of broken people and enclaves of the lucky few; or rip ourselves apart like France in 1798, we have to do better.

Comments

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

I'm still confused by the term "public option". Any recommended links?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No. I wish.

The best sense of it I get is this.

At present most insurance is "private",and one has to appeal to the insurer to be let in.

A "public" option (as with a british "public" school") will let anyone in, and the group aspect (to contain costs) will be the size of the populace who opt-into it.

If it's mandated (don't get some form of healthcare be penalised), the pool is not less than 30 million, maybe as many as 50 million, right off the bat.

Which, in theory, should make it cost-competitive (and more than) with the private options. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and the insurance industry is trying to 1: Kill it. 2: Knee-cap it. 3: Make sure it looks so heinous it fails the court of public opinion before it gets off the ground.

They seem to think doing that will prevent a real repair of the system.

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

http://institute.ourfuture.org/files/Jacob_Hacker_Public_Plan_Choice.pdf

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

thank you

*reads*

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

'The' public option (as embodied in various versions of HR 3200 that have been voted out of committee) would not allow just anyone to join, at least at first. To get it bootstrapped there would be a period of three or five years in which people with existing plans could not join; only those without insurance now or who lost it somehow could join initially.

(Presumably existing private insurance plans would be subject to the new regulations such as no pre-existing conditions, no recission, no termination, etc, but this is not entirely clear to me.)

The public option would be able to compete with existing private plans on the basis of size, as you point out, but also on the basis of not having to make a profit, simply breaking even. This, of course, is at least part of what makes it so frightening to private insurers.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the British use (or used to use) "Public school" in the way you cite.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

A "public school" was a school which did not (and, in theory, still doesn't) restrict who may enroll by virtue of class. Anyone who could afford the fees could, in theory be entered.

This is how commoners go to mingle with peers (and, of late, with royalty).

So it was open to the "public", but there were several bars to be crossed before one could be admitted.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

Whereas in Scotland, a school you had to pay fees for is called a private school, as opposed to the public schools which are paid for by general taxation and operated by the council and open to everyone of school age unless they have specific conditions which prevent them from taking part eg blindness.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks. I was going by (at least my understanding of) the original usage for such university-preparatory boarding-schools for boys (originated by Eton, if memory serves) -- "public" in the sense of not being operated by and exclusively for members of a particular religion. (Not that some of them didn't mandate attendance at Church of England chapel services.)

Much confusion is likely to arise, of course, because they're precisely what Americans term "private schools", while our "public school" equates with the British "state school".

I'm glad you included "...in theory...". In fact, I think, the number of scholars admitted to the more prestigious U.K. public schools is limited and preference (at least used to be) given to the sons of earlier graduates (much like Andover, Harvard, & Yale in the U.S., until recently and maybe even now), with application sometimes being filed within days of their birth. As I understand it, most or all of those British schools provided for a few "scholarship boys" who might come from any economic class (brilliant, but usually at the bottom of the school's social ladder), but the number of them, and of the scions of newly-rich families, was carefully kept small in order to avoid much contamination of the Upper Class students. (With "Upper Class" having a variable & vague definition, but often including merchant families who've been rich for two or more generations, and cadet branches several generations removed from a peerage.)

Nowadays, I gather, many of these old public schools accept day-students from the local populace, are co-educational, and have stiffer entrance exams (though I rather doubt that a Prince of the Blood Royal could flunk one), but still, as you say, there are several bars (rather high ones, at that) to be crossed before one can be admitted. The same applies, I suppose, to matriculation at the older Colleges of the Universities at Oxford and Cambridge.

But (as usual) I'm wandering from the point, which was intended to be that I think most people who'd get a "British Public School" reference would be likely to perceive (rightly or wrongly) implications of:
Exclusiveness,
Expensiveness,
Snobbishness, and
Impracticality.

President Obama hasn't (AFAIK) bothered to do more than sketch out his idea of a Public Option Plan (perhaps because he didn't want to waste his time on something he knew would be unacceptable to the Insurance Companies, which he doesn't wish to offend), but from the hints we've been giving it seems to have just the opposite of the abovementioned qualities.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That, as they say, depends.

The attempt to introduce various "triggers" was/is a way to have a public option, in theory, and never actually have one, in fact.