Why The Public Option No Longer Matters

Two interesting views of yesterday's disaster brought to us by Max Baucus, et. al. (D - Wholly Owned Subsidary of AHIP) are here and here. The first leads to the conclusion that we're likely to be saddled with a trigger-less (good) but non-negotiable (bad) public health insurance plan.

The second asks the pertinent question - what exactly is the benefit of this versus a co-op? Since the problem with a co-op is the lack of similar negotiating power to a 300-million-person federal program (that has the power to negotiate), there is little to no benefit to having a public option without negotiating power.

However, there are two potential minor benefits of note.

In conjunction with the rest of the health insurance reform provisions, a public option (minus all the overhead and profit-margin) has a small chance of being more affordable than private for-profit insurance, especially when you're forced to give all your money to the health care industry have coverage.

The more likely outcome is to buy time for certain Democrats who would be getting creamed, at least until the costs and lack of benefits in a toothless public insurance plan become all to painfully apparent.

Unhappily, I'm not sure there's enough time for Da People to express their dissatisfaction to their elected officials with this state of affairs through the usual medium of polling.

But we're eventually all going to realise just how useless the Democratic Party can really be... (and that makes three benefits of a powerless public option!)