Yesterday, the conservative Blue Dog Democrats struck a major deal in the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee in regards to the public health insurance plan proposal.
The public plan will still be a part of the eventual House bill, but payments won’t be tied to Medicare’s current reimbursement rates for health care providers, reported the Washington Post. Instead, the HHS department, who would run the public plan, would have to negotiate prices with care providers themselves.
This would put the public option on almost even-keel with other private health plans currently on the market.
So on one side, liberal Democrats are up in arms, believing this weakens the public plan. But on the other, this deal means the public option will have a lower risk of forcing private insurers out of the market.
Truly what it means is that Americans will have more equal choices in the market. Regardless of what many public plan supporters have said, the previous Medicare-like payment structure would have most certainly given the public plan an inherent advantage in the individual health insurance marketplace: It would be able to set premiums that other private plans wouldn’t be able to match.
If the point of the public health insurance plan is to give Americans more options, this Blue Dog deal makes perfect sense. It’d be unfair to allow one baseball team to only have eight players on the field as opposed to nine, right?
But the question of how it will affect Americans who currently have coverage still remains a big question, one that is actually making headway in the public opinion. A whopping 69 percent of Americans are concerned health reform will decline the quality of their own care, reported The New York Times.
On the surface it seems like the this deal levels the playing field, but will it have the gusto to help millions of Americans who don’t have coverage obtain insurance for the first time?
Just one of the gazillion questions that remain.