Alternative health

Alternative health

Public health insurance option – Alternative plans

An alternative that has been proposed is to pump federal money into various private non-profit health insurance cooperatives (co-ops) to get them to become large and established enough to provide cost savings and into setting up transparent health insurance exchanges that would host them among.

An alternative that has been proposed is to pump federal money into various private non-profit health insurance cooperatives (co-ops) to get them to become large and established enough to provide cost savings and into setting up transparent health insurance exchanges that would host them among health insurers. These co-ops would likely be statewide. Howard Dean and other Democrats have been critical of abandoning a public option in favor of co-ops, questioning whether the co-ops would have enough negotiating power to compete with private health insurers. Prominent economists such as Robert Reich and 2008 Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman have also questioned co-ops ability to become large enough to reduce health care costs significantly and thus support the public option instead.

Those desiring reform beyond the public health insurance option have argued for a single-payer system, which is planned to be brought for a vote. A single-payer system has been claimed by some as politically difficult, and Barack Obama has come out against it, stating in a joint session of Congress, "...it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch." Obama had expressed that he is a proponent of a single payer universal health care program during an AFL-CIO conference in 2003.

Instead of creating a network of statewide public plans, Senator Olympia Snowe has proposed a "trigger" in which a plan would be put into place at some point in the future in states that do not have more than a certain number of private insurance competitors. Senator Tom Carper has proposed an "opt-in" system in which state governments choose for themselves whether or not to institute a public plan. Senator Chuck Schumer has proposed an "opt-out" system in which state governments would initially be part of the network but could choose to avoid offering a public plan.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Public health insurance option, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki