Under the Public Option, the government offers a taxpayer-financed health plan that all citizens can buy into.
If we are going to tackle a problem this big we must rid ourselves of popular delusions and misinformation.
Firstly, a public option would not eliminate the massive overhead that healthcare providers have been saddled with in administering billing to tens of companies in each area with widely varying criteria to assure payment. Not only has this tripled the required staffing to deliver healthcare over the last few decades, but only serves to assure insurance profits on the backs of those providers and patients.
Should we allow the actual providers of healthcare to become bankrupt to preserve corporations that have no function beyond delivering payment? If Wall St has its way that is exactly what will happen, and Wall St owns our political system, lock, stock, and barrel. The most efficient system to deliver payment to healthcare providers is Medicare, and it has been for a long time.
The US government now (pre-pandemic) pays somewhere around half of all medical billing in the US with a 2% overhead, compared to 20+% for private insurance. Medicare also provides cost control that isn’t available with insurance, especially since Obamacare made it a regulated utility similar to electric generation that makes more profit from higher spending, not less.
Secondly, the US government doesn’t spend “taxpayer money”. It creates new currency for all spending and taxes only serve to limit inflation (which we haven’t seen for many years) and to accomplish social goals. As the monopoly issuer of US dollars, Congress can “afford” anything that exists and is for sale priced in dollars, even without revenue. It never needs to borrow its own currency back to enable spending and future spending is not affected by past spending unless all resources and labor have been deployed.
When Biden says the price tag of single-payer healthcare is too high he is relating it to a person’s budget as a currency “user” and he knows it. The numbers he throws around as “payfors” are not obligations the public would be responsible for. A sovereign “issuer” of a fiat currency can never run out of the currency it produces on-demand and can never involuntarily fail to pay any obligation denominated in that currency.
Instead of arguing from the false premise of cost, we should concern ourselves with making sure the real resources are in place to provide healthcare for all who need it. The employer-furnished insurance model for providing healthcare was failed prior to the pandemic threat, but it has been proven failed at the cost of lives, not dollars. The harder we attempt to preserve such a failure the worse our outcome will be. For-profit healthcare will never be able to justify the level of readiness for such a threat as COVID-19 presents. Only using public money for the public purpose will pull us through this, but we must act soon before critical supply chains collapse.
