Public Health Insurance Plan at Risk Right Now
There are now a few key dynamics jeopardizing the inclusion of a public health insurance plan in the committee’s final bill. First, Chairman Baucus is getting intense pressure from moderate colleagues on the Committee to step away from his own proposal and instead seek bipartisan support for a less effective and less comprehensive reform package (which, among other things, would fail to control skyrocketing costs).
The pressure on the hill to push a plan with bipartisan support is gaining traction. And there is a real danger that passing a bill that the everyone in the U.S. Senate can support could take precedence over enacting a law that everyone in America needs.
That’s why we need Democratic Senators on the committee to support their President, their Chairman and the creation of a public health insurance plan as part of real reform. Most importantly, we need supporters of the public plan to become real champions and make the case with their colleagues for why a public plan is a central part of any successful reform.
Senator Schumer has been the biggest champion of the public option on the Committee, exemplifying the kind of smart and passionate advocacy that’s required at this critical time. For example, on Wednesday he headlined a press call (along with Richard Kirsch, HCAN’s National Campaign Manager) and made a strong case for why we need a public health insurance plan to make the industry competitive, control costs, give consumers choice and raise the quality of benefits.
Senator Schumer has laid out parameters for a strong, national public option. While not as extensive as other versions, Schumer’s approach creates the political space to attract moderate support and make this a reality. We need Chairman Baucus and his Committee to support it.
The second dynamic is that Democratic Senator Wyden has been working to build support – especially among Republican members – for his own proposal, which would tax employer-provided benefits and create a weak, last-resort public option. The Wyden proposal would establish a market-based “trigger” for the creation of a public plan (a plan would only be triggered by a dysfunctional and uncompetitive market). This would reduce the public health insurance option from a national plan with the capacity to make big improvements in how we deliver care to a series of fledgling state plans, developed in isolation and only when a state’s insurance market is in desperate shape. Wyden and Finance Committee Republicans, of course, are backing a bad policy – the system is broken nationwide, with 94 percent of markets in the United States already considered “anti-competitive” by objective DOJ standards.
However, the “trigger” proposal is smart politics, and could provide an artificial “third-way,” allowing members to vote for a public option that will either never be created, or be created only under adverse conditions (on a state-by-state basis) that would increase the likelihood of its failure.
The third dynamic is that the trigger option has legs of its own, beyond the Wyden bill. Senator Snowe, for example, a key moderate Republican, has referred to the trigger as a “fall-back public plan.”
We simply cannot allow a public option with a trigger to make it out of committee. We need to talk with Senators they have relationships with and make it clear that a reform bill with a public option that’s held back by a trigger is not a reform bill it all. It’s simply a way to capitulate to the politics of the day and squander the historical opportunity to make a lasting difference.