My confidence in the idea of a public option was slightly shaken, along with that of probably many people, when I listened to This American Life's recent episodes on health care (available on their website at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/... In his radio broadcast, Ira Glass and a team of NPR News reporters talk about the problems with health care for two solid hours, hitting on topics like drug prices, malpractice, and general cost issues.
One conclusion they made on the program (discussing with a health care economist and a few other people) is that the effectiveness of the public option is in question. They discussed the fact that a large reason why health care premiums go up is because certain companies don't have significant leverage with hospitals and therefore are charged higher prices for the same operation. Then they state that the public option might, in fact, raise prices for those still on private insurance plans because it will lower the leverage these companies have.
Kind of a backwards concept when you're in a supposedly free-market system, that more competition could result in higher prices, but apparently it's a possibility. Mind you, this isn't a conservative blowhard bashing the public option - I believe that they state that a single-payer system is the ideal money-saving plan, so they're definitely still liberal thinkers.
I'm certainly worried about this because this has become such a bastion of progressive health care ideology nowadays, and if it might not even work, then that's a problem. In the program, they discuss the fact that health insurance reform is just one facet of what needs to become health care reform. They talk about the fact that health care prices are so expensive because of numerous, complicated factors - things like doctors overtreating patients due to fear of lawsuits, drug companies pushing brand-name drugs over generics that would work equally well, and so forth. They painted a picture of health insurance companies as, even though it might be counter to everything that we've come to believe and that Michael Moore has made movies about, not really a collection of terrible people who want the poor to die. Instead, health insurance companies are middlemen stuck in a crappy system skyrocketing out of control.
Now, it's entirely possible that This American Life was absolutely wrong in everything they said. I'm no expert on the subject, but I thought this was some food for thought when everything seems to be a fight over "public option or no public option". Perhaps our ultimate hope is that the public option leads to a single-payer system five, ten, or twenty years from now.
Please do everything you can to replace my faith in the public option. This isn't meant to be a troll diary, and if you can give me evidence that the public option is great, please do! I want to have confidence in it.