Health Care Reform Advances Another Step in the Senate
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this week that the public option, with an opt-out provision, will be included in the health care reform legislation to be presented on the Senate floor. While this is a victory for public option advocates, it is a limited victory for a host of reasons.
The proposal embraces a weak form of the public option – with only a small number of people eligible to take advantage of it. We have no idea what form of public option will be included in the final bill – or even if there will be a public option in the legislation that emerges from a still-a-long-way-to-go process.
“But,” as Hendrick Hertzberg suggests, “that doesn’t mean health-insurance reform won’t be worth doing even without one. The resulting ‘system’ will be a nightmare, of course, but it won’t be as bad as the current nightmare. Once another twenty or thirty or forty million people are covered, however crappily, the issue will no longer be whether they should have coverage. It will be how to make coverage better and more efficient and more humane and, for society, less expensive in relation to outcomes.”
