A Public Health Option Should Be Just One Option Among Many
I do not believe every American need or wants “public health care.” I personally prefer what we might best call a “simplified health care” system only as a safety net for people who can’t afford our current system. I envision clinics and hospital wards instead of private doctors and semi-private hospital rooms, and a requirement that generic drugs be the first alternative every time, and no chance to win the Malpractice Lottery and get a court award beyond actual costs and a reasonable, adjudicated amount for pain & suffering.
Call my plan “Wal-Mart medicine” if you like. And if it’s done as a private industry thing, Wal-Mart will probably be part of it, since they’re America’s largest low-income employer & are already experimenting with in-store clinics for both employees and customers.
You might also call this “low-bid medicine” or “public health.” Everyone should be allowed to enroll in it, with premiums subsidized for those who can’t pay for even discount-level treatment.
And those who want better (or at least fancier) medical care should be free to buy it on the open market.
I suspect that many employers, including Wal-Mart and most fast-fooders, will opt to pay for this level of care for employees, with higher-grade *optional* plans available at employee expense.
Higher-grade employers might subsidize more deluxe medical coverage. Fine. Let them.
Not everyone wants minimum-cost, clinic-style medical treatment. And not everyone can afford high-cost, personal-attention medicine, complete with the privilege of suing a doctor (or at least a doctor’s insurance company) for millions of dollars.
Some will have you believe that a health care “public option” means “free health care” or that it must be run by people with Lenin-style beards and attitudes.
Not so.
The word “option” is important here. Some doctors and nurses will opt to work in a clinic-style environments where they don’t need to obsess about insurance company reimbursements or ruinous malpractice awards if they don’t order every conceivable test every time. Others will prefer to stay in a more traditional physician’s office setting. Remember, we’re talking “option,” not “mandate,” here.
None of this will be “free,” either. As many yowlers like to point out, almost anyone can get some level of treatment by showing up at a hospital ER, which is totally un-free to the rest of us even if an indigent patient doesn’t pay for his or her own care. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to cover those indigent patients under the “public health option” and send them to the local clinic instead?
Perhaps yowling packs of licans will persuade Sen. Nelson and other DINOs that this should all be run by private companies, because licans are about profit and greed, and this will give them a chance to give profits to their corporate masters and get big campaign contributions (AKA bribes) in return.
Even with substantial lican bribes factored in, a decent, clinic-based public option health plan should still be much more efficient and a lot less costly than what we have today. And we certainly need something more efficient and cost-effective than the medical care “system” we have in America today.