Public Option

Matt Zeitlin writes:

What’s interesting about the [public] plan is how it was originally conceived as a piece of honest wonkery by Jacob Hacker, as a way to give Americans the benefits of government sponsored health care and to increase competition with private insurers, especially in places where one or two insurance companies dominated the market.

Matt's an informed, intelligent liberal, which I why I read his blog. However, I still can't get my head around how people think the second justification makes sense.

Food is important. Arguably more important than health care because without food medical care ain't all that important. Yet, nobody's talking about creating public grocery stores to compete with private ones. Instead we have food stamps, which are vouchers for food.

It makes far more send to me to use antitrust laws to break up the dominated markets and then offer vouchers, a la food stamps, to deal with inability to pay. Now, I recognize that there are differences between the market incentives in food production and distribution and medical insurance and care, but I don't see these as precluding a market solution.

As for the first justification above, I think that is at least logical. The public option is a way to give Americans access to government care. And, I'd add, a way to stealth single payer in, which was the entire point as far as I can tell, and as Matt mentions:

Basically, the very same interest groups and constituencies that made single payer a political impossibility weren’t going to be fooled by the public plan, especially when it’s promoters were openly telling liberals that the public plan would eventually lead to something like single payer.

Where I think Matt, and much of the Left, goes wrong here, I think, is that it's not just that the insurance companies, medical device companies, pharma, hospitals are dumping money toward fighting the problem, but there is a real skepticism of government that runs through the center, both geographic and political, of this country. I put this thinking in the same category as Matt Ygelsias' repeated insistence that the public's antagonism toward taxation is the result of Republican propaganda over the last few decades rather than something goes back to the Whiskey Rebellion and the Revolution itself.

I've seen the polls, and when asked if they want a 'public option' or 'more choice' people say, "yes." But once the details emerge the people balk. Now, I'll admit there's a lot of misinformation out there about the health care debate. Crazy shit. And the LaRouche supporters aren't helping any. BUT...liberals might want to consider the possibility that the American public is not at liberal as they are.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the American people want a public option. Shit. Maybe they want a single payer plan. But before the Left attributes the backlash to their policies to evil big pharma and insurance companies they ought to consider that maybe what plays in Manhattan, Boston and SF isn't an accurate measure of the pulse of American political landscape.* It's much easier to blame those you resent for your troubles than to recognize that the people whom you are trying to help might not want it.

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* I would note, alternatively, that what plays in Texas isn't either.