Not gonna happen with Pelosi treatening everyone........
I want to believe this but the government has rarely shown that it can run things too efficiently. The employment in those "public" entities, be it education, package delivery and transit tend to become like social programs with benefits we can't afford -- and we are repeatedly faced with service reductions or tax/fee hikes to continue to sweeten the deal for those employees or sustain the unsustainable for a couple more years. Look at the cost of education, K-12 adjusted for inflation per pupil.
The whole purpose of the Public Option is to introduce more competition driving down cost.
You make great points, but to combat your numbers, the education talking heads would merely apply an inflation number and say the spending levels are the same, in inflation-adjusted dollars.........
The bigger concern for me is the question of how many high earning (and highly taxed) individuals will see this as an incentive to get off the hamster wheel, stop w*rking, and start collecting a lot of "lower income" health insurance subsidies instead of paying a lot of taxes.
Seems like a lot of people around here are happy to have Medicare waiting for them to get a few years older. And no one seems to be proposing to abolish Medicare despite the fact that it will take a substantial influx in funding to fix. As to the public option, if no one would sign up for a public option why is the insurance industry so frightened of it? And don't pile on with the canard that it's losses would be covered by tax dollars. It was to be structured as a stand alone program that had to rely on on premiums to fund its costs. It ain't rocket science to make that an iron clad requirement.
That's a howler. Medicare, SS, the entire Federral budget --we have a great track record of writing checks for the kids to pay off. Every year since 1969 Congress has spent more than the tax revenues that came in. Anyone remember the "iron clad" Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act? How did that work out?
The Federal Thrift Investment Program. Works just like Vanguard but simpler and cheaper. But, unlike Merrill Lynch, et al., their mission is to maximize value for their investors. And, mirable dictu, they contract out much of the work to the private sector.
Look, I agree that the health care bill as passed will end up costing a boatload of dough. We will spend a whole lot of time working to adjust to it. A major portion of the cost problem comes from the subsidies to low income citizens (something we as a nation have decided is worthwhile). But the subsidies simply go to pay for premiums - to the public insurer or a private insurer. It isn't rocket science to devise a Federally managed program like the TSP to offer health insurance. If it isn't effective its premiums will price it out of the exchange and out of existence.
Do smokers and the obese get bigger SS and public pension checks to make up for the fact that they "save us money" by dying earlier? Do we place a tax on healthy choices because of the cost "the healthy" are putting on our SS and public pension systems by collecting more from those systems on average?
