Word: optionally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...debate has progressed, the public option has become an ideological flash point, igniting fears on the right that it will be the precursor to a government-run system like Canada's and some European countries'. Which is the same reason that many on the left like the public option so much...
Over the course of the health-care debate, the public option has come to assume many shapes. And as politicians oversell it as either the destruction or the salvation of the American health-care system, they rarely bother to specify which of its many incarnations they are talking about...
...save the Federal Government $110 billion over 10 years, according to the most recent estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). (The Federal Government's costs here would primarily be the subsidies it gives low- and middle-income people to help pay their premiums.) Not surprisingly, that robust public option faces strong opposition from doctors and hospitals, who complain they are already underpaid by Medicare, as well as from insurance companies, who say they would not be able to compete. So while this version of the public option is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's preferred one, she acknowledges...
What she can probably pass is a different version, approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, that would establish a public option that operates more like a traditional insurance company, with the Health and Human Services Secretary negotiating with health-care providers to determine how much it would reimburse them. That wouldn't raise as many objections from health-care providers and insurers, but it wouldn't save all that much money either. The CBO estimates it would trim federal spending by about $25 billion over 10 years...
...help keep down costs - a provision that Republicans have criticized as the first step to socialized medicine, and several key Democrats are wary of. Citing his concerns for the impact on the federal deficit, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut told Fox News on Sunday that "if the public-option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience," he would not support the bill. The Senate is waiting on a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate this week before they bring up the bill. Reid's office is hoping to start floor debate as early as next week. (See 10 players...