The News-Press reporter paraphrased what Dean and Moran had to say about cost savings. The proposed public option, “would bring costs down considerably, as private health care providers would have to compete with the more efficient operation of a public option that would, among other things, spend less on administrative overhead,” the newspaper wrote.
Well. If there’s one thing the government is famous for, it’s efficiency.
Last year, a friend from the Labor Department explained the process she needed to go through if she wanted, say, 100 copies of a memo to take to a conference. There’s a form to fill out. It’s made of carbon paper. Remember carbon paper? The date on the bottom says the form was last revised in February 1978. Carter-era efficiency comes to health care.
“Under this reform, no one could be denied coverage, and the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients, among many other things, would go down,” the News-Press added, summing up what Dean and Moran told the audience.
This is difficult to believe. To summarize: the government would provide more insurance to more people, and prices would go down. The government would promise to provide excellent coverage to everyone (nobody could be turned down for a preexisting condition) and prices would go down. It makes no economic sense.
As the News-Press also wrote, “The high cost of administrative overhead, Moran noted, is currently due largely to the efforts of for-profit insurance companies to decide who and what they will cover, and who and what they won’t.”
Not quite. The reality is that the government doesn’t compete; it compels.
Governments already set the regulations private insurance companies must work within. Governments already provide lists of services insurance companies must provide, and these services vary from state to state. Once there’s a “public option,” the federal government will set demands on private companies even as it undercuts their prices, running them out of business within a year or two.
Next week, lawmakers return to Washington after spending a summer being told, in no uncertain terms, that Americans don’t want government-run health care. We’ll soon find out if they thought we were joking.
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Correction: Last week I wrote that “The Road Not Taken” was written by Robert Burns, when it was written by Robert Frost. As one sharp reader pointed out, I should “bring Bobby back by tying him to Carter [because Burns wrote] ‘Malaise of the Last Minstrel’.” That’s a good idea, and I wish I’d thought of it.