One of the things that has really left me puzzled in the health care debate (besides the obvious problem of there being a large segment of the population that gleefully believes whatever scary nonsense Glenn Beck spews that day) is the controversy surrounding the public option. The reason I'm puzzled is that it seems obvious that it's a really good idea (unless you're the CEO of Aetna or someone similar, but not that many people fit in that category). After all, the public option lowers costs and expands the choices available to the public. Almost certainly, the private insurance options available on the market will improve quickly and substantially if they have to compete with a public plan. Really... what's not to like?
So why is the public option an obstacle, instead of being one of the chief selling points for health care reform?
I think the answer is largely contained in this post by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. It's a great post (like most things Steve writes), and is worth reading in full. But this tidbit is really striking:
Meanwhile, 35 percent of Republicans thought the public option refers to "creating a national healthcare system like they have in Great Britain" -- but so did 23 percent of Democrats.
Got that? Quite a significant number of people believe that the "public option" means, literally, socialized medicine. While I personally wouldn't have a problem with that, I am fully aware that quite a lot of people would. This leads to an accuracy and perception problem in the health care debate, and it leaves our star player- President Obama- playing nothing but defense. So... what to do?
Well, we could change the nomenclature. Steve Benen basically says as much in his post, though he couldn't come up with one that was descriptive or catchy enough (other than the free pony option).
So I mulled it over, and came up with two main criteria by which to judge a new name for the public option... and they are the following:
- It must be short enough to stick in people's minds, and fit easily into a David Letterman joke.
- When placed in the following question: "Do you support x?", it has to sound better than "Do you support the public option?".
For the second criterion, I wanted to adopt the mindset of typical, only partially informed citizen (not a wingnut). From that perspective, the question "Do you support the public option?" sounds a bit frightening. If you don't know any better, you might plausibly believe that something called "the public option" might be opposed to "the private option", meaning that all private insurance would be replaced by public insurance. That sounds radical, and my hypothetical citizen would probably answer "no", just to be on the safe side. Basically, it sounds like "the public option" reduces my choices down to one, instead of expanding my possible choices.
So, with that in mind, here's the best I've come up with so far:
"An optional public insurance plan"
or, even shorter:
"An optional public plan".
When my hypothetical partially informed citizen hears the question "Do you support an optional public insurance plan?", I think she would seize on the word "optional". Then s/he would think, why not? I'm almost always in favor of more options... I can always say no or cancel if I don't like it, right?
Is it short enough? Catchy enough? Descriptive enough? Would it sound good coming from Obama during a townhall meeting (instead of saying "I support the public option", he would say "I support offering the American people an optional public insurance plan")?
Would it work?