“New Public Option” Not a Public Option

[limpyhobbler]

By: David Dayen Tuesday October 30, 2012 10:49 am

I saw some liberals getting excited about this New York Times description of a nationwide health insurance plan that they cleverly tried to posit as the by-product of the public option.

The nationwide plans would get contracted out by the federal government and be available to consumers in the insurance exchanges. National plans, government-run? Sounds like a public option, right?

Well, no. Multi-state health plans will be made available to exchange recipients. But they will merely be contracted out by the federal government, and run by a private insurance company. This was devised as an admittedly weak substitute to the public option, and nobody who actually understands the Affordable Care Act is presuming that this is in any way the same deal.

These plans are not, however, actual public options. “This is not government-sponsored, and it’s not a public plan,” says Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University who focuses on health policy. “These are plans that contract with the federal government.” [...]

No one at the time, however, thought the multi-state plan would work much like a public option at all. “It’s not really similar at all,” says McDonough, now a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health. “It’s something that’s going to be more like one private plan choice.”

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via http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/10/30/new-public-option-not-a-public-option/