Co-ops are the hot topic today, so here's a few pieces about them.
From Ezra:
As the situation stands, there's no existing model for co-ops to follow and no policy specifics on Conrad's idea, so it's impossible to say whether, or how, they will work. I could imagine very good co-ops or totally useless ones. But given the political forces arrayed around the issue, I think that's sort of the wrong question. The idea works if it somehow solves the political problem that birthed it.
Sam Stein:
The health care reform compromise that centrist Democrats and several Republicans have indicated they'd support has shown an inability to effectively lower premiums for consumers, a newly resurfaced government study shows.
In recent days, a slew of lawmakers, notably Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), have begun a renewed push to establish health care insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a publicly run insurance plan.
But there's a study at hand that undercuts the argument that co-ops would drastically alter the health insurance market.
The U.S. General Accounting Office produced a report on cooperatives in March 2000 that was mostly sour on the idea. Using five different co-ops as examples, the study concluded that on the key function -- lowering the cost of insurance -- these non-profit insurance pools came up well short.
From Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Law Professor at the Washington and Lee University:
Third, the coop idea is a smokescreen, not an effective strategy. Coops are legal now, and we have only two of them that anyone can find. Why don't we have more, if they are such a great idea? During the Depression, rural health insurance coops were federally subsidized, and 600,000 people were covered by them. The subsidies went away, and so did the coops. The barriers to entry for entering health insurance markets are so great that even big commercial insurers don't try to compete with the dominant insurer in many markets. To think that a few local businessmen getting together over breakfast at the Perkins to start a local coop to compete with the Blues or United is like starting an electric company in your garage to compete with Con-Ed. Not going to happen. See papers I have written on this here and here.
From TPM:
So if at the very least you thought that the Democrats could escape the "government run health care" canard by, say, dropping their plans to create a government run health insurance system, you were mistaken. As the RNC makes clear, in their eyes, "Public option by any other name is still government-run health care."