More on the problems with the “public option” health plan

Here’s a post from the Physicians for National Health Care blog:

Professor Jacob Hacker of the University of California at Berkeley (and formerly at Yale) has been a leading proponent of reform based on a national insurance exchange of private plans with the addition of a public plan option. And what does he have to say about the impact that a public plan option would have on market share for the private health plans? He says that under his proposal, “more Americans have private insurance after reform than do before — either through their employer or through the new national insurance exchange.”

Get That? Even with a Medicare-like public plan option, the market for the private insurers will expand. That is the real tragedy of this debate over a public plan option. It has led us away from the debate we should be having instead: an affordable single payer national health program for everyone, versus expansion of our over-priced, inequitable, and inefficient system of financing health care through private plans and public programs [my emphasis]</blockquote>