Public Option Kills Private Insurance

If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, Biden assures voters. Where have we heard that before?

 By Scott W. Atlas. Excerpts:

"Yet the public option is a bad idea. Government insurance options mainly erode, or “crowd out,” private insurance, rather than provide coverage to the uninsured. Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist credited with designing ObamaCare, showed in 2007 that when government insurance expands, six people go off private insurance for every 10 people who go on public insurance.

Consider the experience in Hawaii. Only seven months after offering Keiki Care in 2008, the country’s only statewide universal child health insurance, the state ended its optional program. Some 85% of those who signed up already had private insurance. Those costs were suddenly shifted onto other taxpayers.

The public option would cause premiums for private insurance to skyrocket because of underpayment by government insurance compared with costs for services. According to the American Hospital Association, annual underpayment by Medicare and Medicaid surged to nearly $76.8 billion in 2017, nearly doubling once ObamaCare’s regulations came into play. That added a burden of more than $1,500 a year on families paying private premiums."

"Even Democratic presidential candidates calling for “a public option” openly admitted in the recent debate that it would inevitably lead to a single-payer-dominated system."

"Nearly four million Americans turn 65 annually; by 2040, that population will reach 87 million, twice what it was in 2012. Medicare’s Hospitalization Insurance fund will be depleted in 2026, the Medicare trustees predict. The program is also fraught with error, fraud and waste to the tune of $60 billion a year as of 2014, according to Government Accountability Office estimates."

"More than 600,000 Swedes buy private insurance, according to Insurance Sweden, on top of paying $20,000 per family annually through taxes for their socialized system. Despite spending thousands of dollars through taxes on the National Health System, half of Britons earning £50,000 a year or more buy private insurance or plan to, and some 250,000 pay cash for medical services, according to official statistics."