A 'public plan option' won't ensure quality care
By QUENTIN D. YOUNG
Politico
Letter to the editor
5/5/09 4:29 AM EDT
While Carrie Budoff Brown accurately reflects some of the arguments for single-payer health reform, such as the vast savings in administrative costs our nation stands to reap from national health insurance (“Groups strategize for single-payer plan,” April 28), a casual reader might mistakenly get the impression that single-payer advocates are pressing their case merely as a bargaining chip to win a lesser reform — specifically, the creation of a “public plan option.”
Not true. Single-payer advocates, including our 16,000-member Physicians for a National Health Program, are still pressing full-bore for single-payer national health insurance. A public plan option simply can’t deliver the savings and other efficiencies we need to ensure universal, quality care. Nor is it a “stepping stone” toward single payer.
As my colleague Dr. David Himmelstein told a congressional subcommittee last week, “A health reform plan that includes a ‘public plan option’ might realize some savings on insurance overhead. However, as long as multiple private plans coexist with the public plan, hospitals and doctors would have to maintain their costly billing and internal cost-tracking apparatus. Indeed, my colleagues and I estimate that even if half of all privately insured Americans switched to a public plan with overhead at Medicare’s level, the administrative savings would amount to only 9 percent of the savings under single payer.”
Only a true single-payer system (“Everybody in, nobody out”) can yield the administrative savings — estimated at $400 billion annually — needed to provide comprehensive, affordable care to everyone.
Placebos that preserve the role of the private health insurance industry, such as the reform measures proposed by the Obama administration and key lawmakers like Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), with or without a public option, can’t even come close to these results.
Adoption of a publicly financed health care system has become an economic and moral imperative.
Quentin D. Young, M.D., M.A.C.P.
National coordinator
Physicians for a National Health Program