The health care debate in Washington is spinning over a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report which did an analysis of the costs and effectiveness of the Senate's current health care bill.
According to the New York Times, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) thinks that the report shows that the costs of the bill in its current form is too high:
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican on both committees drafting health legislation, said he found the office’s numbers stunning. He calculated that the Kennedy bill would cost taxpayers $62,500 per uninsured person over the 10 years.
I obtained a copy of the 615 page draft legislation last week. There is not a single sentence in that 615 pages which refers to the creation of a public plan. While there have been some assurances from Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) that he will add a public option at a later date, the fact remains that the CBO only scores what is actually in a bill's text.
So when Orrin Hatch says that he's shocked by how much this bill, which by the way is the only bill Republicans say they will support, costs, he's telling the truth. The cost of not keeping the insurance companies honest is staggering.
Insurance companies who get the benefit of a mandate without competition from the public option will undoubtedly raise their prices. Working Americans will be priced out of health insurance. The government, not wanting to tax somebody who is making $10 an hour, will be forced to provide waivers. And those people will be forced to use emergency rooms--the most expensive place in medicine--as primary care centers.
Essentially, nothing will change. Orrin Hatch is right, the cost of not changing the system is staggering. If we don't lower costs, and increase access to preventative care by implementing a public option which would keep prices down by increasing competition, we'll be paying $62,500 per uninsured American over the next ten years. And, without a public option, there would still be 36 million uninsured Americans in 2019.
We've seen the Republican plan in action before. In the state of Massachusetts, then-Governor Mitt Romney (R) forced a health insurance mandate without a public option through the legislature. The state government in Massachusetts was forced to offer thousands of waivers to its hard-working citizens who couldn't afford insurance on the unreformed private market.
The CBO has yet to score a public option. It has scored the preferred Republican option of doing nothing. And after this nonpartisan analysis, we now know that President Obama is right when he says the costs of doing nothing are too high. If the Senate truly wants to reduce costs and increase access to medical care, it'll include a public option in the bill.