If I hear one more pundit comment on the "death of the public option" I just might scream. Luckily, rumors of the PO's death have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the PO gets more popular every day.
That's excellent news, but we don't need to stop there. Kossacks can take a leading role in demystifying and championing single-payer insurance. Most of us already believe it to be the best way to put the U.S. economy back on track, to help small businesses compete, to cut costs and also provide universal coverage. Our vocal, enthusiastic support for single-payer might just tip the balance in favor of an Inclusive Public Option.*
And right on time, here's a terrific article in the Toronto Globe & Mail: "An Inconvenient Truth for the GOP: Canada's System is Better." Details over the fold.
Canada's single-payer, universal health insurance plan is just plain better than American health insurance.
The hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.
But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology cannot dispute. Canada's approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance. When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United States.
The article looks at four concrete measures that show that Canadian health care (and the single-payer insurance system that drives it) leaves the American "system" in the dust:
- Life expectancy in Canada is 80.4 years (or 2.5 years longer than the U.S.'s 77.8 years)
- Infant mortality in Canada is 5.4 per 1,000 births (versus 6.37 in the U.S.)
- Canadians spend 10 per cent of their GDP on health care (Americans pay a staggering 16 per cent)
- These disparaties are striking, especially given the fact that between 40 and 50 million Americans ("well in excess of the total population of Canada") have no coverage at all.
The August madness took us by surprise. Through the hot dog days of summer, the Me!-Baggers showed us their arguments. They're not pretty, and they're not new, though their paranoid, racist, "me-firstism" has managed to find a small, deranged following. Fine. Let 'em wallow in their selfish cocoons. The Me!-baggers got some media traction and scared the politicians, but we fought back heroically, and reality has become once again an important component of the debate.
Truth is on our side. Reasonable people, anybody who's ever dealt with an insurance claim, knows full well that the system is terrible. People who can't get insurance, people losing their jobs, recent high school and college grads being dropped from their parents' plans, all know what it's like to live without insurance.
And anybody with a little empathy can understand that it's painful for a family to lose a home and belongings to medical debt, just because someone had the bad luck to get sick.
I'm willing to accept an Inclusive Public Option* as a compromise, but as key senators backpedal with impractical distractions and delaying tactics like "triggers" and "co-ops," I think it's time to take another hard look at the single-payer system. It's a reasonable alternative to the fiscal and social crisis our health care system faces. And when more people understand how it works, more people will understand why we keep insisting on an Inclusive Public Option to the profit-oriented wealth extraction health insurance industry.
*UPDATE: I've edited the term "robust public option" to "inclusive public option" instead, as per Meteor Blades' suggestion in the comments below
Agreed with your overall take. But let's ...
...get real about the public option as we know it. None of the current proposals would provide a "robust" public option. Certainly the 5% welfare model public option isn't robust. I think we should stop using this buzzword and exchange it for "inclusive."
An inclusive public option is one that would be available to anyone. In other words, it would actually be an option, a choice, rather than a last resort option available only to people who currently have no choice.
(I would add that an opt-in to Medicare would fit that description.)