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On Saturday night, the Senate will take a procedural vote to move debate on the current health insurance enrichment bill in Congress forward.
Democratic Senators like Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, and Chuck Schumer, through a project called Citizens for a Public Option, have been building support for the public option and encouraging Americans to write letters to the editor that debunk health care reform myths---myths that the conservative echo chamber have been propagating.
Senators (and representatives in the House and Obama) can champion this health insurance legislation all they want and claim it will "foster greater competition in the marketplace, create more choices for consumers, and lead to lower costs and better quality for all," but doctors who have been on the front lines of America's sick care non-system do not believe many of the arguments that Democrats are using to create support for a public option.
Myth #1 -- Public option will help control costs
Dr. Margaret Flowers with Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) explains that Americans have been led to believe that "the public option is going to keep companies honest and help control costs."
Obama and Congress are taking an approach that has failed to control costs time and time again.
"We've already had states that have tried this type of approach over the past few decades," says Flowers. "Every state that has tried this approach has had these grandiose hopes where they had said we're going to cover this many of hundreds of thousands of people in this time period and not a single one of them has succeeded. They've all fallen far short and then gone under financially."
Self-employed doctor, Dr. Matt Hendrickson, who risked arrest in a MobilizeforHealthcare.org action at the Cigna Offices in Glendale, CA, cites examples "from the last 20 years of states that have attempted a public option." He explains that Tennessee, Oregon, and Massachusetss (twice) have tried the public option.
"In each case, the number of uninsured went down briefly then returned to the baseline for one reason: cost," said Hendrickson. "There's no way to control cost as long as you allow private insurance industry to add a 25% surcharge to all healthcare transaction and to continue divert money to avoiding the sick, marketing and advertising, to avoid the sick and try to dump them onto a public plan."
Anesthesiologist Dr. Samuel Metz, who is with the Mad as Hell Doctors, explains, "Massachusetts has been held up as an example of a state that has come closest to providing universal health insurance. However, not only has it failed to provide universal health insurance. It is also now the most expensive place on the planet for healthcare. It leads the U.S. in annual cost per person."
The public option, "will not reduce the cost of healthcare," says Metz. "In fact, it's anticipated it will add $800 billion more into a system that's already twice as expensive as the average industrialized nation."
Myth #2 -- The public option is a "public" option
The public option that came out of the House, according to Dr. Flowers, is "even worse than we could have imagined because they're predicting that maybe 2% of the population will be able to go into that public option, that it will be run by private insurance companies, and that it will actually cost more than private insurance."
What's so public about something only open to 2% of the population?
As Kevin Zeese from the Prosperity Agenda explains, "No matter how much you hate your current insurance, no matter how much they've abused you with premiums, co-pays, denials of care, no matter what they've done to you, you can't leave your insurance and go to the public option," said Zeese. "90% of Americans can't even choose it. So much for choices."
Flowers adds the government would be subsidizing the purse of private insurance to try to help people buy their products. Government would be putting public dollars into the pockets of private insurance companies. And, a private corporation would be allowed to run the public option.
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