A staple of the right and the defenders of the status quo that is only working for the insurance companies is that the government is trying to get between you and your doctor. Everyone who has ever dealt with an insurance company knows that is bullshit; and if anyone would bother to ask the front-line providers of health care, America’s family physicians, the doctors who return your call at 3:00 a.m. – they would find out that the doctors want reform, too.
Since no one seems to be asking them, they have decided to tell you. Less than an hour ago a press release from the American Academy of Family Physicians landed in my inbox. The AAFP has launched a website Heal Health Care Now to inform patients and push back against the lies of the noise machine that is trying to kill reform in the interest of insurance company profits.
But do you know what I found really interesting? Who the AAFP partnered with to get their message out. Brave New Films? The “Pssst. Do something!” folks? The masters of the progressive viral video? What I read between those lines is that the physicians who want reform have abandoned hope of conservatives getting on board, and they have gone all-in with progressives.
But what did we expect, really? At the end of the day, they are physicians, and as such they are necessarily pragmatic. It would appear that they have decided to concentrate on the patient they can save.
now let me share just an opinion. We need to come up with a better title for the single payer/public option.
The Repugs did it with so many bills. It was most often poor policy but they were great at marketing their legislation. No Child Left Behind is a great example. This legislation was based on a fraud and completly unrealistic. But it had a great name. My suggestion would be Medicare for All.
single payer is just that. Public option is a multi payer system. The two are very different programs.
Single payer saves money by cutting insurance companies out of the loop. This saves anywhere from 20 to 30 cents on every health care dollar. It also frees providers from bureaucratic work associated w. servicing multiple payers. All in all Single Payer would save approximately 400 billion dollars per annum by these two actions. The House Bill HR 676 is called as you say Medicare for All. Congress and the Obama administration have forbidden Single payer, Medicare for all on the table for discussion. They have also refused to allow Single Payer to be scored
Public option, on the other hand, maintains the multipayer system keeps costly insurance companies in the loop and obliges providers to maintain expensive bureaucracies to deal w. the multiple payers. Public Option has been scored by the CBO as costing one hundred billion dollars every year.
When we roll the two together as one, we muddy the already murky water relating to reform. Because of the reluctance of the Public option proponents to fairly state what they are going to write into the bill allows right wingers to have a field day because they can infer and exaggerate all of the positions that these reformers have not yet taken.