The overlooked options

by Marie Cocco, The Leaf-Chronicle • September 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — Now that everyone in politics has concluded that the "public option" is about to be very publicly dropped from health overhaul legislation, perhaps it is time that everyone understands that the public options we already have are working very well.

The upside-down logic of this retreat makes about as much sense as irate Medicare beneficiaries who turn out to protest "government-run health care" while insisting that their own government insurance remain untouched. In our current public discourse, no absurdity is too ridiculous to be called farce.

Yet there are still facts that can get in the way of fictions, as the Census Bureau's recently released annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage reveals. That there is so much bad news, and so much more to come, is taken for granted. Conveniently overlooked is the good news: Government programs that shield the elderly and the poorest among us from economic catastrophe are working precisely as they are supposed to.

The number of uninsured climbed by 682,000 in 2008, another figure that is sure to rise as the impact of job losses and benefit cuts in 2009 are felt. There are 6.6 million more Americans without insurance now than there were in 2001, at the bottom of the last recession, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The number of uninsured would have been far higher had there not been an increase in coverage through Medicaid and Medicare.

Those on the opposite end of the age spectrum also have been spared the worst of the recession. People 65 and over were shielded from the drops in income that fell on the working-age population — as a group, income among the elderly was unchanged. The reason, of course, is Social Security.

The government has safeguarded the weakest in society from the worst of our economy's failures. It has done so through government-funded (but not government-run) health insurance that relies on private doctors and hospitals to deliver care and, in Medicare particularly, offers a wide choice of providers. Its cost is high. But the growth in Medicare spending per patient has been slower in recent years than the growth in per-patient spending in the private insurance market.

Those who complain that Medicare is "bankrupt" conveniently forget that the Medicare payroll tax rate has been frozen since 1985. The last infusion of new tax revenue into the program came in 1994, when the cap on the amount of income subject to the payroll tax was lifted.

The Massachusetts state insurance program is the model for President Barack Obama's approach, and is a template once hailed by Republicans as a victory for "choice" and private insurance. Yet more than half of the newly insured get their coverage from the two "public options" that were made available,.

We know what can work. Yet the shrillest voices and the most entrenched special interests are insisting that Congress jettison a public insurance option in health overhaul in favor of untested private insurance "co-ops."

If they fail, there will be more disillusion and anger. And, we can only hope, electoral punishment for those responsible.