Helping the uninsured by threatening them.

[Drake Tungsten]

Ramo, are being deliberately retarded?

Yes.

It's become apparent to me, both in this thread and in the other one where you spent your time throwing around terminology instead of explaining yourself clearly that you are far too invested in this issue to discuss it meaningfully.

QFT

[Ramo]

The primary benefit associated with a public plan would be the ability to bargain more effectively with medical providers with its scale. Any quasi-monopsony should be under close public supervision, so the distinction between non-profit administrator and civil servant would be pretty damn important.

[Ramo]

QFT

Yeah, yeah, I misread Dino's article, got defensive, yadda, yadda. But if you want to salvage that line of argument, there is that whole Medicaid thing that permits fair comparisons.

[Drake Tungsten]

I really don't care about your poor showing in this thread; you were intellectually dishonest enough in the other healthcare reform thread to put me off discussing the issue with you. You're too personally invested in the topic to discuss it rationally.

[Ramo]

Oh, please. Given that the Kennedy legislation is actually in print, you are in absolutely no position to talk about intellectual honesty.

[DaShi]

Here's a good article on the public option being discussed by Obama and Kennedy.

An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.

But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”

In practice, however, if a public option is available, it will probably enjoy taxpayer subsidies. Indeed, even if the initial legislation rejected them, such subsidies would be hard to avoid in the long run. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants created by federal law, were once private companies. Yet many investors believed — correctly, as it turned out — that the federal government would stand behind Fannie’s and Freddie’s debts, and this perception gave these companies access to cheap credit. Similarly, a public health insurance plan would enjoy the presumption of a government backstop.

Such explicit or implicit subsidies would prevent a public plan from providing honest competition for private suppliers of health insurance. Instead, the public plan would likely undercut private firms and get an undue share of the market.

You have a strange definition of a "good article." That's just an opinion piece with a lot of misconceptions and guesses.