Word: optionals
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...Meanwhile, the White House Monday sought to tamp down reports that it has misgivings about Reid's plan to bring a public option to the floor, which may well cause the only Republican who might vote for reform, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, to vote with her party. Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a statement declaring that President Obama is 'pleased that the Senate has decided to include a public option for health coverage, in this case with an allowance for states to opt out. As he said to Congress and the nation in September, he supports the public option...
Initially, the public option was a relatively small feature of the health-reform design, meant primarily to assure that there would be some competition for private insurers. As President Obama noted in his September speech before Congress, no more than 5% of Americans - largely those who are now uninsured - are expected to sign up for it. But the public option has assumed an outsized political significance, thanks to the fact that it has become a flash point between the left and the right. That is in part because both see it as a potential precursor to a government-run single...
Insurers are furious that Senate majority leader Harry Reid's health-care-reform bill will include a public option - even though it lets states opt out if they don't want the government-run insurance alternative. Liberals are ecstatic with Reid over that same public option - even though opt-out states would be able to keep their markets completely private, which would limit the public plan's power to negotiate volume-based discounts in other states. (Read "Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide...
...impressive bipartisan consensus regarding the power of inertia. For all the disagreements over the public option, almost everyone agrees that making it the default is a big deal, and that the compromise allowing opt-outs is a pretty modest compromise. That's because reams of studies have shown that default settings really, really matter. If Reid's legislation had omitted a default public option but allowed states to opt in if they wanted one, insurers would be ecstatic and liberals would be furious...
...strategies: a state is not a person. An individual might end up in a public-health plan out of pure inertia, but it's not clear whether a conservative state like Louisiana would exhibit the same status-quo tendencies. Governor Bobby Jindal is an outspoken opponent of the public option, and an ambitious politician; Louisiana legislators might be eager to distance themselves from President Obama and the Democratic Congress...