C&L has an item today about the administration walking back its commitment to any robust public option,Sebelius: Not Only Is It Not Single Payer, We're Going To Make Sure It Never Is. The idea is that a public option is likely to steal customers from the private sector if it is cheaper than what they offer, and we have to be sure that any public option won't kill off the private insurance industry, because..., well just because. You could write a diary or two hundred about that "just because", but my interest today is in comparing this idea that a cheaper public option will kill off the industry, to the last big idea the administration and its apologists offered, the "path dependence" meme.
A few weeks ago, the shiny new argument that was supposed to wow we simpleton single payer advocates into supporting this turkey of a health care non-plan, is the idea that you can't just go for what is theoretically the best solution, single payer, but you have to be realistic and acknowledge that we're not going to get the uninformed masses out of the rut of what they're used to in paying for health insurance. There is a "path dependency" to affairs in this imperfect world, and we have to settle for a mishmash non-plan that leaves private insurance diddling in the middle because that's what 180 million Americans are used to, and no reform will succeed if we violate their comfort zone.
Well, except that everybody knows that people, even if they are attached to their doctors, are at best wildly indifferent to their insurers, and at worst, and especially if they have any experience actually trying to get their insurer to pay a claim, would hang them from a sour apple tree if they got half a chance. Let this public option be a dollar a month cheaper than what people have now, and everybody knows the private insurance industry is dead meat. Since there doesn't seem to be any plausible way to artificially keep a public plan that won't have to spend zillions hustling new customers and denying the claims of old ones from being way more than a dollar a month cheaper than what the industry offers, we have reached the point in the public debate where the putative representatives of the people need to exclude any real public option, lest they offend unto death their employers in the industry. That public that we were told last week is so path dependent that it can't be channeled into a public plan, we're now told actually has to have a huge dam erected to keep it from flowing inexorably downhill as it seeks the Ocean of Single Payer.
Gee, I wonder what the story will be next week. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!