Hey Progressives, Join Forces to Fight the Health Insurance Industry!

By Karen Dolan, Institute for Policy Studies. Posted June 29, 2009.

“A ‘Public Plan’ is a sell-out, crafted to appease Big Pharma.”

“’Single Payer’ is politically impossible, and advocacy of it only weakens our one chance at real reform.” 

As our country once again tries to fix our unsustainable for-profit health care system, conflicting messages threaten to derail the whole process. Progressive advocates, progressive members of Congress, and health care providers need to provide a roadmap through the maze of conflicting perceptions.

Progressives have at least two remedies to the healthcare crisis:

1)   A “single-payer” system, which is most easily described as “Medicare for All.”  It is a publicly financed, privately delivered national healthcare system, This option makes healthcare a human right, granting universal coverage, eliminating out-of-pockets costs for consumers and slashes wasteful administration costs of our current patchwork for-profit system. As Physicians for a National Health Program reveals “The potential savings on paperwork, $350 billion per year, are enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying more than we already do.” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced a bill that calls for Single Payer.

2)   A “public option” system, which offers a public (government) health insurance option alongside the private, for-profit plans that make up our current system. It would compete with the for-profit plans, preserve the so-called “marketplace of competition,” but provide a guarantee of affordable, accessible high-quality healthcare to all. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has what seems to be the most progressive principles for such a public option.

One problem in progressive circles that contributes to the confusion is the perception, real or not, that single-payer and public option advocates are fighting each other, weakening support for both. Though some of that is going on, the greater problem is that people think that's what's going on, and thereby try to push each other out of the room.

There are very few healthcare advocates who will tell you that a single-payer healthcare system is not the correct remedy for the U.S. health care crisis. What they instead will say is that single-payer is dead politically, and that Obama and the Progressive Democrats' public option is the only politically viable option.

Most smart single-payer advocates, like the California Nurses Association, Physicians for a National Health Program and Progressive Democrats for America, will tell you that the proposed public option won’t solve our healthcare crisis. But often they identify the real enemy as the for-profit health industry, not the incremental proposals that seek to address the crisis.

Like both camps above, I too believe that the only real solution to our health crisis is a universal, single-payer, “Medicare for All” approach. Only through a public system that puts patient care and not corporate profits as the bottom line can we achieve the promise of health care as a human right, and effectively bring down exponentially skyrocketing healthcare costs at the same time. Even the best public option runs the risk of being the dumping ground of the nation’s sickest people while only slightly cutting overall administrative costs. A public option system does not achieve the goal of health care as a universal human right.

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Karen Dolan is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. She directs the Institute's Cities for Progress project.

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