Got Health Insurance? Fighting for a Public Option Might Just Get You a Raise!

The best argument for overhauling our ridiculously expensive and dysfunctional health care system -- an argument one doesn't often hear in the corporate media -- is that fixing it would put more dollars in your pocket, even if you already have health coverage. 

If there's enough pressure on Congress, we'll add a well-designed public insurance option to the current mix of private insurance and government health care programs. It would be like (the highly popular) Medicare program, but open to all comers. We'd end up with a very large insurance pool that would  lower costs through efficiencies of scale. The plan would be able to drive a hard bargain with providers and cut down on overhead costs, which amount to about 30 percent of spending in the U.S. right now. 

And it wouldn't just contain costs. A publicly administered insurance program would also protect Americans from the kind of health insurance nightmares we hear about so frequently, with families bankrupted by out-of-pocket expenses or stuck in jobs and relationships they hate in order to hold on to their insurance. 

But at the end of the day, people are most interested in the heft of their wallets. Ezra Klein argues that if people understood the health care debate in these terms -- reform the system and control costs; get a handle on costs and get a pay raise! -- it'd be a political game-changer.

"Most workers think stagnant wages mean their employer is paying them less," he writes. "They don't know that the main reason for stagnant wages is that their wage increases are going to pay for their health insurance premiums." 

Over the past 30 years, economic growth hasn't made its way into most working people's paychecks. But -- and this is key -- the amount businesses have to pay for an hour of work has increased.

Looking just at the George W. Bush years -- and before the current recession gained steam -- economists Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein found that while average weekly wages for (nonsupervisory) workers increased by a paltry 1.7 percent annually, average compensation -- including health care and other benefits -- increased by 5.1 percent per year. 

If we stay on our current trajectory -- driving fast toward a cliff, as the baby boomers hit their "golden years" -- it's going to get much worse.

A picture can be worth a thousand words, and this graph, based on projections by the Council of Economic Advisors, shows that Americans' incomes will remain flat long into the future if rising health costs aren't better controlled.   

The Disease-Care Industry's Fearmongering 

Of course, the usual suspects -- the "disease care" industry, corporate-funded think tanks and conservative media outlets -- pit us versus them, framing the issue as a "government takeover" of health care.

They invoke images of gray-faced bureaucrats deciding that you need a colonoscopy whether you want one or not, your doctor relegated to the sidelines. They warn that you'll lose the ability to choose from different plans and providers. 

In a column debunking the industry's "propaganda," syndicated columnist Froma Harrop dispatched the spin with ease: 

What about freedom to choose providers and treatments? Well, private insurance also sets rules on what it will cover and typically provides lists of preferred doctors and hospitals. If your plan lets you go out of the network, you have to pay extra for the privilege. Nothing wrong with that, but we must drop the romantic notion that private coverage affords total freedom at popular prices. 

And while the whole point of a public option is to compete with private insurers -- using the same efficiencies and economies of scale that big corporations employ all the time to cut costs -- the notion that a public option would kill off private insurance is nonsense.