The Salt Lake Tribune: Should have been single payer

Editorial: End of Arches points to single-payer

The Salt Lake Tribune, October 29, 2015

The collapse of Utah's cooperative insurance provider, the Arches Health Plan, was not unforeseen, either by those who favor the Affordable Care Act or those who have always hated it.

Count Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch among the latter.

Hatch's preferred alternative, the Patient CARE Act, has the advantage of not being Obamacare. But it is at least as complex as the ACA, shifts more costs onto consumers and more work onto states. Worst of all, passing it would force millions of Americans who have finally found health care under the current law back to square one.

Which is what just happened to 63,000 Utahns who will have to find new coverage now that Arches has tanked.

All of this fiddling with rival steampunk assemblages of subsidies, mandates, taxes, exchanges and co-ops continues to burden Americans because Republicans have never accepted, and Democrats have never fully sold, the realization that a country where millions of people do not have access to affordable health care is the skunk in the garden party of First World nations. No truly civilized society would tolerate such a condition.

The establishment of non-profit co-ops was one of many unsatisfying compromises between those who wanted a single-payer, Medicare-for-all design — or, at the least, a government-run public option — and those who irrationally trusted the private sector to provide what it simply is not willing or able to provide, now or ever, affordable health care for all.

The original ACA had funds to back the co-ops if — when — they ran out of money. But the Republican-controlled Congress, frustrated by many failed attempts to repeal Obamacare outright, cut back on the guarantees. So at least 10 such organizations around the country have now failed.

Meanwhile, premiums continue to rise and the private insurance sector is consolidating as big firms are bought by bigger ones. There is less and less of the competition that reformers of all ideological stripes were hoping, some with more faith than others, would keep costs down.

What Obamacare opponents do not seem to grasp is that, if it doesn't work, if the co-ops fail and the exchanges don't meet the needs of working families, going back to a pre-ACA jungle will not be a workable or ethical option.

It'll be single-payer, or at least a robust public option. As it should have been from the beginning.

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/3111523-155/editorial-end-of-arches-points-to

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

What a great opener for this weekend’s national meeting of Physicians for a National Health Program. An editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune tells us that, as we see the failures of the co-ops, the inadequacies of the exchanges, and "rival steampunk assemblages," it should have been single payer from the beginning.

They mention, “or at least a robust public option.” But lost in the prior enthusiasm for the public option was the fact that it would not have been an adequate solution since it would have been only one more player in our highly dysfunctional, fragmented health care financing system. But this does not reduce the impact of their message since the prevalent belief was that the public option would eventually lead to single payer (a highly unlikely event since it would not have fundamentally altered the highly flawed, complex financing infrastructure). So their intent is certainly well meaning.

Yes, single payer, as it should have been from the beginning.