Creating a new system called a "public option" is scary. What is it? How will it work? Will it accidentally kill grandma?
Medicare already exists and works great. People love it! Why not let all Americans buy into this system if they want to. Maybe the care you get under medicare won't be as good as if you had that old-fashioned, red-blooded, all-American insurance-industry insurance. Yeah, maybe the medicare plan won't send you to the Mayo clinic every time you have an ache (like that primo insurance-industry insurance probably would), but at least you'd have something; you'd have the basics covered. You'd have medicare.
The issue here is one of framing. It's hard to argue for a public option; we've seen that. But it's easy to argue that medicare is a great thing that people love, and that we don't want to get rid of it. In fact, we want to expand it!
This reframing is certainly not mine! I heard Dr. Nancy Snyderman talking to Howard Dean about it today on Daily Kos TV. Of course, Dean was all in favor of allowing Americans under 65 years old to buy into medicare. He said "that's all I want. That's a public option."
In the same video, we then hear from the opposition, Karen Ignagni, who is from the insurance industry. What I noticed is that she is very against the "buy into medicare" framing. She says "that's a single payer system, and that discussion ought to be held straight-up." What does she mean by holding the discussion "straight up"? She means, that we should not talk about letting people under 65 buy into medicare, we should talk about "single payer plans."
The reason she wants to have the discussion straight up is because she likes it when we use the scary words like "government option" and "single payer." She doesn't like the idea of using easy-to-understand and sensible concepts like "make medicare available to more americans." She equates the two, they mean the same thing to her, but she likes one framing better.
So here's what I'm saying. Let's forget about the public option. That's dead. Instead, let's allow Americans under 65 to buy into medicare. It makes perfect sense.
Update: This idea has also been diaried here.