US & Healthcare: The Zombie Option – IBD Editorials

US & Healthcare: The Zombie Option – IBD Editorials

A 2,000-page government takeover of the health system was just enacted, but now congressional Democrats want even more government. The “public option” is rising from the grave.

When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delighted the liberal Netroots Nation convention in Las Vegas on Saturday by telling them, “We’re going to have a public option. It’s a question of when,” most people assumed he was talking long-term.

But 128 House Democrats have co-sponsored a bill to establish a “robust” government-operated health insurance program. Their selling point is, surrealistically, deficit reduction.

One of the bill’s boosters, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., ranked by Govtrack.us as the farthest left member in Congress, claimed a government option would save money the way Medicare does.

Is that the same Medicare that in 1966 was only supposed to cost $3 billion, and that the House Ways and Means Committee once assured the country would only cost $12 billion by 1990? Is it the same program that really ended up costing $600 billion by 2008 — 20% of federal spending? The same entitlement that started spending more than it took in from taxes that same year, according to its trustees? And that will go bust less than a decade from now?

The left is already unhappy with ObamaCare. Writing on CommonDreams.org this month, Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” complained that President Obama betrayed his supporters by not scrapping “our for-profit health system … driven by insurance companies whose goal is to avoid covering the elderly and the sick.”

Like free-market ObamaCare critics, Hedges points out “there is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs.”

Instead, it “will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10% of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will only pay for about 70% of our medical expenses … at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms.”

Liberals are infuriated by the early, foreseeable effects.

Last week in Florida, for instance, Aetna, Blue Cross and UnitedHealthcare subsidiary Golden Rule told the state’s health insurance commissioner they would no longer issue thousands of new individual policies for children. Why? ObamaCare. Blue Cross analysts found that the bill’s coverage guarantee for children could raise premiums for other policy holders by as much as 20%.

But ObamaCare is itself a stepping stone to an eventual public option. As Kathryn Nix of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies noted Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management will be authorized to administer health plans.

“OPM would set benefits, premiums and medical-loss ratios for these plans, and there’s nothing on the books to stop the agency from modeling the plans after a public option. Worse yet,” she adds, ObamaCare “says nothing about any solvency requirements for the OPM-run plans, increasing the likelihood that these plans would require taxpayer bailouts.”