Like Wearing A Seatbelt: Osrzag Says Health Coverage To Become 'Cultural Norm'

I see no difference between seatbelt laws and mandating people buy insurance products.

History is being made, and that is the most important thing afterall.

It costs nothing to buckle a seat belt.

So while I appreciate the "social norm" argument, it seems to me that a comparison to the mandate to purchase auto insurance would be more apt - except, of course, that so many drivers do in fact choose to let their insurance lapse and risk the fine. There's no social cost for violating that law, unless you happen to have a passenger in your car when you get caught.

While any three year old can tell if everyone in the car is buckled up (and can make a big deal if grandma "forgets"), who goes around checking their friends' wallets for health insurance cards?

Adding 30 million under low-benefits coverage is not remotely similar to considering Single-payer. The "Big Picture" must be system cost reforms with meaningful universal coverage and not gilded tiers of "gold-silver-bronze" coverage holes that leave some families fronting 40% of costs.

A "big picture" maybe -- but also a heavily subsidized sad ending lacking administrative tools (like single-payer) to leverage cost reforms.

rand dawson Oregon

>>Orszag was asked several times about the public option, and even why single-payer wasn't considered from the get-go.

It wasn't considered because the entire effort is horseshit. This idiotic reasoning about social norms is horseshit. They're going to force people to buy products from a despicable horseshit "industry" that shouldn't exist in the first place. The fact that Insurance is considered an Industry despite producing nothing of value tells you everything you need to know about late-empire America. The only thing that would deliver true reform would be the creation of single-payer system and the abolition of private health insurance companies.

The Obama administration is just another cog in the great steamroller.

The president never campaigned on single payer, so please do pretend like that's what anyone was expecting.

The solution to our coverage problem is providing everyone with coverage. The solution to our cost problem is reducing the cost, or more likely the cost growth to sustainable levels.

I would argue this legislation makes a big advance on the coverage issue, primarily by Federal regulation of insurance the McCarran-Ferguson act notwithstanding. It would be much much better to have one single insurance exchange for everyone in the country under federal regulation. Maybe if progressives would stop hyperventilating over the "public option" these points could have been made more forcefully in the debate. As you well know it is more important to have a single negotiator than a single payer. Again the PO debate has distracted us from making that important argument.

I don't happen to think price controls is the answer to containing costs. I think the issue is primarily with over-utilization and the massive incentives (and social pressure) to pay for more care, not the right care. We know for a fact that places like Intermountain HealthCare know how to do this right. Unfortunately they are fighting against our current single payer system that has asinine payment rules. The PO and single payer crowd have never focused on how to pay for health care correctly, and so the junior senator and his handlers, who understand this inside and out have no one out there in the public watching their back. And that just the way the doctors want it.