A Healthcare Debate Primer: Part I

Over the next few months, we are sure to see many changes in the Obama administration’s quest for accessible, affordable health care. My traveling has started anew, with me enjoying the Big Apple this past week for a healthcare reform conference. I’ll then be flying in to Washington, D.C. later this month. To talk intelligently with our officials to help frame the final product, we have to keep up with the daily changes and bill additions/proposals that are being considered. While different approaches are being taken to get to a bill that everyone can agree on, there are many terms and concepts that most have in common. I’ll be addressing this in next few columns, and I thought it would aid in understanding what’s going on by defining a couple of the common terms and concepts.

The biggest item causing the most contention currently is being called the public plan. This is perhaps the easiest to define in simple terms; it’s implementation, however is very problematic for the Obama administration because of the opposition it faces from various groups. Simply stated, the public plan option is a government-run, non-profit plan.

There are many reasons that there is opposition to a public plan which we’ll explore in future columns, but for many it simply is a way for the government to get enough traction to implement total government-run health care, called socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is a healthcare system where everyone in the country is covered automatically, with no one being turned away. It’s also called single-payer, as in there is just one payer for care (namely the government). Americans are perhaps most familiar with Canada’s system of healthcare when the topic of socialized medicine comes up. There isn’t much difference between socialized medicine and a public plan option other than theoretically a public plan option wouldn’t dominate the marketplace. Reality may be another matter entirely.

Democrats and others had been pushing for some form of socialized medicine as a "safety net" for those that can’t get insurance due to pre-existing conditions or cost. With most legislation calling for a ban on pre-existing conditions and market controls to hedge the cost, lately they have been promoting the public plan option as a way to "keep insurance companies honest" by providing more competition. How a non-profit plan that makes its own rules, sets reimbursement rates for their providers and doesn’t pay tax on the premiums it collects can compete (fairly that is) with for-profit companies that do pay premium taxes is anybody’s guess, but that’s for another column.