The Public Option

You cannot have effective and substantive health reform in this country without the inclusion of a public option. It’s the only way that people, who are your average consumers, can have affordable, meaningful, and accountable alternatives available to them in the marketplace. A public option would force insurers to respect consumers, moderate costs, and compete more honestly in the marketplace.

Public insurance is clearly more efficient. Medicare has proven that! It is able to cost less and cover more, as can be seen in every other industrialized nation. And it’s pro-choice, if you will. It doesn’t yet get rid of the mess that is health insurance in the private sector, but it allows folks the select a preference. Besides, it lowers administrative costs and operates outside the need for profit. It forces private insurers to respond in kind or price themselves out of demand. If there’s anything that needs to be done at this time by the government, it is to throw its weight around to ensure quality healthcare for all of its citizens!

Many folks have historically conveniently claimed that the government is spendthrift, burdensome, inefficient, wasteful, and—get this—can’t compete with the private sector. Now, they’re running scared with the idea that a public option will destroy the corporate insurance system—screaming buzzwords like socialism and Afro-Leninism to capitalize on xenophobic ignoramuses. Enough is enough! What business are we about anyway? Are we to care more about corporate interests than we are about what will best serve the masses of people, especially those who can’t navigate the private insurance system for lack of funds or arbitrary qualifications? Right now, business has not proved that it can serve the people better than the people represented by government. And they’re afraid of that challenge!

The public option is not meant to replace or get rid of private insurers; it’s not insisting on a single-payer plan, like it or not. What it does do is provide a crucial counter position to private insurance plans that are becoming increasingly consolidated and eliminating real choice. The bottom line is that if we are seeking to provide affordable quality care to consumers, a public health plan is essential.
We have not yet even talked about the unemployed, who, obviously, cannot rely on an employer largely to assist in the acquisition of health insurance. A public option would not be tied to an employer, and those who find themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder would be able to get the help they need to stand and become more marketable. It seems we would rather embrace a broken system that is clearly failing millions upon millions of people as well as the uninsured, than develop an option that makes affordable, accessible, and quality health care a reality for us all.

What other way is there to curb costs and crooks than to have a federally overseen and controlled health care system? Basically, I believe not to have a public option is immoral and a travesty of justice. The probity, or moral fiber, of a nation is measured by how the poorest are treated. If we are interested in making the United States a stronger nation, we need to ensure that all of its citizens have affordable, unimpeded access to quality health care. Health care is one of our basic existential needs, and as such people should have the right to medical care so that they can continue to be or become regular contributors to the body politic and the entire sociocultural milieu. I have an especial concern for those who are poor and those who have been perennially locked out of the structures, processes, and policies of our democratic republic. They are the ones who are screaming for a public option, and their voices are not really being heard. As a matter of fact, their lives depend upon it, both figuratively and literally! A public option is the only meaningful, ethical, and hospitable way to reform the health system today.
 
Ahungered and impoverished are the least of these
Let our love for them abound;
And on Jericho’s Road aid the needy. . .
Lift each person off the ground.

As long as there is poverty,
No one can be secure
As long as some are unhealthy,
Nobody can be pure.

As long as my brother’s hungry
And my sis has shoeless feet,
No one can eat comfortably
Or walk the streets complete.

As long as some are ignorant,
Those with knowledge grow wry;
As long as our hearts are distant,
Souls side by side shall die.

As long as people hunger, as long as people thirst,
And ignorance and illness and warfare do their worst;
As long as there’s injustice in any of God’s lands—
We are our neighbor’s keeper, and dare not wash our hands!