The forum was attended by several health care professionals and reporters who asked Hillary a number of questions. One question, asked by Susan Dentzer of PBS news, dealt with the choice of a public option. Here’s the exchange:
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SUSAN DENTZER: Senator, your plan envisions purchasing pools modeled after the Federal Employees Health Care System, which would allow people to pick either a private health plan or a public plan which you’ve said would be modeled after Medicare. But a lot of your critics say including a public plan in that approach is really single payer through the back door, that it would create a new federal bureaucracy, it would saddle tax payers with huge new costs, and probably produce overwhelming pressure to clamp down on health care prices. How do you respond to that? |
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SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D-N.Y.): Well, that’s a either misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what I’ve proposed. The Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan currently has more than 250 private options. And the cost on average is about twenty-five to thirty percent less than what you can get through your employer or through the private marketplace. So I think that approach of having this broad array of private plans really does offer the competition, once we change the way insurance do business, that they have to begin competing on cost and quality. I’ve included the public plan option because alot of Americans want it. I believe in choice and competition. Let’s see what happens. It will not create a new bureaucracy, it will not create the kind of government-run system unless you think Medicare is government-run. In Medicare you choose your doctor, you choose your hospital, you have tremendous choices. We’re going to offer for non-Medicare eligible Americans a comparable plan. Now a lot of people will still choose, in fact probably the majority, a private plan, because if the private plans are competitive and smart they’ll offer a lot of new features. Because once they don’t have to spend $50 billion a year trying to figure out how to avoid covering people, maybe they will employ more nurses to call and check on whether you have taken your blood sugar today, whether you’ve gone for your walk if you’re a cardiac patient. They’ll actually be looking to create medical homes and coordinators for chronic care patients. And the public plan will do the same thing, but it will be more of a pass-through, because there won’t be the overhead, and the administrative costs, and the profit. But what are we afraid of? Let’s see where the competition leads us. And for all those people who believe that the private system is by far the best, they’re going to have more than 250 options to choose from. And for those people who like the fact that Medicare, which insures private choice, only has a three-percent administrative cost, they’ll get to make that choice. And I think we should be willing to learn. There’s been way too much emphasis in ideology in the last six-and-a-half years. I want to get back to evidence-based decision making. What is the evidence, what are the results, what kind of decisions then flow from that. And so I believe including a public plan option gives Americans the choice, and then we’ll learn more as we go forward. |
As a small business owner and someone who would happily buy into a public option in my state or through the federal government were one available, Hillary Clinton hits all the right notes. It’s clear that her "critics" or her Republic opponents intend to suggest that the public option is a backdoor to socialized medicine. It’s also clear that Clinton is committed to the public option because people like me want it, and we don’t want our neighbors to need to give up their private insurance to get it. As for this leading to single payer, Clinton seems unfazed. She’s more concerned that Americans have options including a public plan and private insurance, and I think that's appropriate. She’s interested in "evidence-based decision making", and argues we allow for competition between a public plan and private insurers, and see where it leads us. Given Hillary Clinton’s robust defense of Medicare and her quickness to point out that Medicare includes the choices of private insurance at 3% the administrative cost, it’s hard for me to believe she’s in the pocket of private insurers.
This is just the first in what will be a multi-part series detailing Hillary’s performance at the forum, in addition to other statements and health policy positions she has articulated. But, I think it important since so many people seem either unaware of unconvinced that Hillary intends to offer a public Medicare-like option.
To watch the forum:
http://kaisernetwork.org/...
To read the transcript:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/...
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