Will President Obama fight for meaningful health care reform — or will he attempt to appease the unappeasable? We’ll find out today when he addresses the American Medical Association, which opposed health care reform initiatives by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Only Johnson, who brought us Medicare and Medicaid, and was as handy with the stick as he was with the carrot, prevailed.
Last week we learned that the AMA — a reactionary organization with deep and odious financial ties to Big Pharma — remains glued to the tip of the economic right wing. In comments delivered to the Senate’s finance committee, the AMA opposes the Public Option, the Democratic Party’s pale substitute for the single-payer system that it ought to support.
The AMA does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs across the health care system. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans. In an effort to keep public plan costs low, it is likely that a public plan would receive special advantages and government subsidies that would not be available to private insurers. Rather than stimulating competition among insurers and strengthening the health insurance market overall, the competitive advantage of a public plan would be so great that many private insurers would be pushed out of the market entirely. A crowd-out of private insurers and the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.
Actually, the public option would save money because it would not have to distribute profits, advertise, or employ a vast army of clerks assigned to collecting premiums and denying claims.
After the New York Times got hold of the comments, the AMA started backtracking; grudgingly.
Trying to appease the AMA is akin to trying to appease the Taliban. It doesn’t work. Obama needs to confront the AMA. And if he brings a carrot, he should use it as a suppository.