Actual information about health care reform

Phil (dig the Hawaiian-Punch-esque design of the Percolator website, btw) writes in:

With everybody on the news going apeshit about the Health Care Reform Bills, it's easy to get confused. Crazed town-hall meetings, bizarre terms like "Government Death Panels" being coined, how all this is affecting Obama's approval ratings, for fuck's sake; it's obnoxious. It seems like the story is about all the different kinds of reaction to the bills, but I haven't really come across a clear explanation of what's supposed to actually be in these bills. It's frustrating. So for those of us still confused as to what's actually in the Health Care Reform Bills, I came across this today:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/aug/13/health-care-reform-simple-explanation/

So far, this seems like the clearest, simplest explanation of what's supposedly in these health care reform bills and some of its major controversies. This is by no means a complete explanation -- one glaring ommission: a description of exactly how the government-run public option intends to make its coverage decisions. But I'm at least happy to see this very basic explanation after all this freaking time.

One little note about a point in the actual article: It says that conservatives "argue that employers, motivated by cost, will drop their coverage and send their employees to the public option. Some believe it's a stalking horse for an eventual single-payer system; others believe it's simply unfair competition for private providers." Well, whatever happened to the unyielding conservative faith in the free market? If private providers were so worried about losing business to the public option, wouldn't they just lower their costs or provide much better coverage to stay competitive? Or is there some sort of basic economic principal that I just don't know and am not applying to this situation? I just don't buy this argument.

Also, is Politifact worth a damn? I'm not a news junkie or anything, but I'm always a little wary when my news comes from sites I know almost nothing about. Well, I'm always a little wary regardless.

Thanks for the link; it looks like a pretty useful summary of the key aspects of the proposals currently circulating in Congress. As far as Politifact, I haven't heard of it either, but on the face of it seems to be a pretty legit fact-checking outfit.

I think you're right about the conservatives' arguments against the public option not adding up: they want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they like to say that government-run insurance would be a disaster: it will be run as poorly as the DMV and the Post Office! they say. On the other hand, they claim that a public option will put the private insurance companies out of business by out-competing them. Presumably they think that the government-backed plan will be tax-payer funded and so be able to charge below-market-rates, thus crowding out the private insurers--but this isn't true, according to the Politifact article, which says

Congress is negotiating now to put safeguards in place so the public option competes on even footing with private insurers. Those include requiring the public option to finance itself through customer premiums (i.e., no taxpayer subsidies) and to make it negotiate like any other insurance company on what it pays doctors and health-care providers.

So long as the public option is implemented with these constraints, I don't see how it could be that it will have an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

(A brief aside: it didn't look like this was mentioned explicitly in the article, but it seems that the public option will only be an option within the exchange that is set up for people who don't have employer-based insurance. So if you have employer-based insurance, you won't even be able to access the public option. That said, it could very well be that once the exchange is set up, employers will abandon health insurance benefits en masse, letting their employees partake in the exchange instead.)

In any case, in my opinion the go-to source for intellectually honest health care blogging from a progressive perspective is Ezra Klein's blog. It's quite good about actually explaining the various health care proposals, rather than people's reactions to them.

PS: I should mention that Carlos and Harinder know boatloads about all this stuff. Maybe it'd be kind of fun to do some informal interviews with them and share their opinions... at the very least, it'd be the rare instance of actual domain knowledge exhibited here on the blog.

(Photo by a.drien)