Actually, I thought of the public option as only a step toward single payer. The HCA is a mess simply because our political system is a mess.

*Blush*

What you said. My mind wedged and used "public option" as a synonym for the "Medicare for all" sort of publicly funded health care system that Canada uses.

Jeez, after 3 years of saturation coverage on this subject you'd think a person couldn't make such a silly transposition error.

The Republicans have one goal only: the overthrow of the results of the 1932 election and everything that flowed from it.

And what idiot starts a war without a tax hike, let alone two? And then cuts taxes. There's a big layer of that deficit that was created by traditional GOP policies that they don't admit to.

The phrase "tax cuts" should be eliminated, and replaced with "tax cuts that add to the deficit." For example, "We want tax cuts that add to the deficit for our favorite corporation" and so on.

Dems should hire Frank Luntz to come up with the "words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate". (PBS Frontline via Wikipedia) As a so-called job creator surely he wouldn't turn down an opportunity to make money and hire more people to work that issue. Luntz has (I grudgingly admit) done a great job of demonizing Dems and their policies through a simple change of phraseology ("death tax" vs. "estate tax", "energy exploration" vs. "oil drilling", etc.) "Public option" is better than "socialized medicine" but we need a snappier phrase that captures the fact that everyone will benefit from "Medicare for all" (including businesses, whose costs to administer health care plans for employees are huge and drive down profitability). Sometimes it's all about marketing and positioning, and Luntz knows that maybe better than anyone.

Correct about Republicans giving lip service to the debt. Who is it that now calls "Deficit Hawks" by the name of "Deficit Peacocks"?

The public option would be run directly by the government, why the not-for-profit versions would not be. So, you would have access to something that looks like Medicare, with all the size and negotiating options which that entails.

Do we need to recap the tale of the goose that laid the golden eggs?

The Biblical injunction against binding the mouths of the kine?

The tale of the man who cut his horse’s oats with sawdust to save money/seemed to work so he increased the ratio of sawdust ...upside? the horse didn’t need taxidermist after its death.

Post WWII there was an opinion held by some that air conditioning contributed to respiratory problems.

The productivity of the American worker is measurably higher than other workers in big part due to air conditioning, health/dental care, housing, transportation. The ...people (for example the Koch brothers) who want to amass wealth from the sweat of others forget this.

The very small increase in cost to the business of the health care would be more than offset by the increase in productivity of a crew that wasn't spending its waking hours looking for work somewhere else.

Food handlers that got flu vaccinations that didn't cost them out of their own pockets would miss fewer days and wouldn't be spreading the contagion to coworkers, reducing the overall number of employees.

Any organization that doesn't support the people it relies on to support it...

It is pretty basic business - maintain your plant property (infrastructure) and provide adequate food, housing, medical care and education and training for your livestock. Not doing these things is a long walk on a short pier.

But then you have people who, when told that Mr. Obama wanted to keep the tax rates the same for ALL income below 250k, stayed up nights thinking of ways to limit their income to $249,999.99.

Yeah, it's beyond me that corporations still agree to fund health care. In fact, I bet many are planning to drop it.

I work in the software industry. I'd much rather that my company do Onshoring and bring tech jobs back home, but they don't have to pay benefits to workers in India.

Well, we all pay for it indirectly through our taxes -- except those corporations who pay -0- taxes or slightly more. That will have to be corrected in an overhaul of the tax code.

That being said, Medicare as a government entity "run like a business" runs at only a 5% overhead/administrative cost. Under Obamacare, all private health insurance carriers are limited to a 15% overhead and profit margin (based on premiums paid in, not the investments the companies make with the cash they are not yet spending on patient medical care).

Because Medicare has a far leaner administrative structure than private insurance companies.

Medicare has an overhead rate of about 2% while private insurance companies have an average overhead rate of about 17%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Medicare overhead includes the cost of administering collection of payroll taxes, overseeing and subsidizing medical residency programs across the country, and fighting fraud and abuse of the system nationwide.

Private company overhead include advertising and lobbying expenses and bonuses to those with a key to the executive washroom, and are more than eight times higher than overhead for the civil servant run Medicare.

John: what you say is true, but I do not think it answers tombisson's question, which was how the public option would reduce the disparity (the deficit) between what the government spends and how much it takes in.

I may be wrong, but my initial impression is that people would have their money paid to the US government instead of the private insurance company. At worse, it means the US government is making the same profits as a private insurance company (which is a lot).

I'd have no problem with the government running a 'for-profit' public option that makes a market rate profit margin, as long as the profit is used to offset costs of insuring those that cannot afford to pay into the system. That way, the private sector can't complain that they cannot compete against it. Two birds, one stone.

This probably wouldnt be cheaper in the short run. Government would be spending money to cover claims that they havent taken in premiums for. In the long run, however, the lower cost of overhead that the public option would provide, as well as the ability for the government to collectively bargain would lead to lower costs down the line. In addition, the larger pool of patients that you cover lets you spread the risk of high payments out wider than a single insurance company can at this point to save costs. Lastly, the way insurance is now if you dont coverage a minor illness progresses to a point where you show up at an emergency room when you have no other options, and all of the paying customers have to pick up the slack for those that cannot. With the public option, everyone has insurance and they can get care when a disease is much more manageable. Diabetes is a great example. It is far cheaper to have a patient insured that can get preventative care (even for decades) than it is to treat the complications such as foot amputations and diabetic comas that come with poor management due to finances. This is how other countries spend less money on healthcare than the US and get better results.

When the federal government is ultimately on the hook to pay for the uninsured and to subsidize insurance for kids and others who cannot get insurance on their own (unless you are willing to look a child in the eye and tell them they should have picked more responsible or affluent parents), as the feds are now, then cutting overhead costs saves the feds money.

As long as hospitals have to serve those without means someone has to pay. Cutting overhead and providing more timely and appropriate medical service cuts costs.

Maybe the best part of the AFCA is that it will force employers that have not been paying for health insurance for their employees -- Wal-Mart, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Denny's to name a few -- to find out how much it will cost them to insure their employees and/or find out how much not providing such coverage will cost them in the good will of their customers. They should have insisted that their representatives in Congress pass the public option or even full socialized medicine. Businesses should be the strongest supporters of single payer health care.

It is not just the health care providers -- hospitals and doctors -- that are driving up the cost of health care; it is the big profits and costs in the insurance industry. And a national health care system would not ration health care like it is currently being rationed by the insurance companies.

I think a big problem with the AFCA is that it encourages employers to skirt the law by having a lot of part time employees. The law should cover every employee who works 12 or more hours. Most people will not work for an employer if they are given so few hours and that will force employers to carry out the purpose of the law. Walmart does not give most of their employees a full time work week. If they want to keep operating with mostly part time employees, the act would then force them to cover even more people thereby costing them a lot more money than if they gave employees a full work week. The retail business could then return to its previous way of operating, full time workers in the day and part time workers at night.

Mike: I agree. What I was thinking of in my comment was the announcement yesterday by Taco Bell and Wendy's that they were going to cut their employees hours so they would not have to provide health insurance. My first reaction was that they should have supported the public option so that they would not have to pay for private health insurance, which is less efficient than Medicare.

I have not been to a Wendy's or a Taco Bell in a long time and I surely do not intend to go until they start treating their employees like people. I wish Wal-Mart would treat their people better because I really do not have the option of not shopping at Wal-Mart. Denny's did have to back down on the health insurance issue because their customers raised a ruckus.

To be fair, Taco Bell and Wendy's themselves are not cutting hours that way, some of their franchisees are. The same with Denny's.

Even though I spelled "roots" correctly when I typed it, "rotts" should be changed to "roots" for clarification purposes.

I just wounder how much of the Tax payers are paying for their family's health ins, do they get if free, I can see paying for the person who is office but not for the whole family, without them paying something too. It's bad enough that we pay for there cars, gas, houses while they are in session and even there pensions, what more do they want from us. So lets take it away from the old, Yep that will do it.

Yup. I will take any health and retirement plans that Congress ordains - so long as all the members of Congress must use them, too.