Katyusha
Kitten at Heart
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2006
- Posts
- 4,782
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a_6Mxz6ewOfY
( Fair Use Excerpt )
Public Plan to Have ‘Small’ Impact on Health Premiums, CBO Says
By Brian Faler
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- A proposed government-run health- insurance option would probably have only a small effect on private insurance premiums, according to Congress’s official budget scorekeepers.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said today that a draft of the so-called public option approved July 15 by a Senate panel would add some competitive pressure in insurance markets served by relatively few companies.
It would probably only have a “small” impact on private insurance rates because the legislation would require a government program to be self-sufficient, meaning it would have to rely on premium revenue rather than tax dollars, the agency said. Such a plan would probably attract a “substantial minority” of people enrolling, the agency said...
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“Premiums for the public plan would typically be roughly comparable to the average premiums of private plans,” said the CBO letter...
If we're going to truly fix healthcare, we have to fix a bunch of other things too. I've come to believe that's the reason that real reform of anything at all hasn't happened. We're treating a lot of the issues that need reforms as separate and wholly independent from each other. They're not. They bleed into each other and overlap and affect each other, and you can't fix one without fixing the others.
How would one get the lawmakers to understand that???