News reports tonight suggest that Harry Reid is favoring a health plan that includes a public option, but that will also allow states to "opt out" of that option. Reports also suggest that the House is leaning toward a public option based on an expansion of Medicare to all uninsured.
I oppose the opt-out provision on the same grounds that Abraham Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas's plan to allow states the right to settle the slavery question themselves. Lincoln argued that to allow new states to settle the great moral question of slavery on their own would threaten the integrity of the Union. Furthermore, Lincoln argued that such "free choice" was a sham, because the people subjected to slavery could not participate in that choice.
Similarly, individuals who can't afford health care could not participate in the "free choice" accorded to their state. The chronically ill in states with no public option might be in a situation no better than 19th-century slaves.
Nonetheless, there is a very simple solution to the "opt-out" problem, which is.....
Require that any state "opting out" of the public option, also opt out of Medicare.
That is, if a state chooses to not make the public option available to its residents, then Medicare will not be available to the elderly residents of that state.
If a state opts out, it opts ALL the way out. If it chooses to consider public insurance for the poor as "socialist," then public insurance for the elderly is also "socialist" -- in that state.
This would effectively merge the Senate preference for "opt-out" and the House preference for an expanded Medicare system.
Of course, if my proposal were enacted, very few states would choose to opt out. If any did, the elderly of that state would quickly storm the state capital, Ok....maybe not so quickly.
I humbly propose that this solution would end the stalemate currently facing Congress.
NOTE: I realize that some accuse Lincoln of hypocrisy since his argument in the Lincoln-Douglas debates applied only to new states, and not the old states of the South. In this, Lincoln very consciously subordinated his moral argument about slavery to the need to preserve the Union. Lincoln recognized that preservation of the Union depended on the sanctity of the Constitution, and that the framers of the Constitution has specifically allowed slavery to persist in the original southern states. Therefore the moral argument could only be applied to new states, without undermining the basis for Union. He hoped that by containing slavery to a small number of states that were stopped from secession, slavery could eventually be eliminated everyplace. In that sense, his solution was similar to mine -- contain the problem to a small number of states while making the practice unacceptable for continuance in those states.