Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Health care: Obama re-emphasizes he wants public option included

You can read the full text of today's letter from President Obama to Congress at this page on the White House site.

Jonathan Cohn has an interesting take on it at the New Republic's "The Treatment" health care blog.

Karen Tumulty's take at Time's "Swampland" blog is also worth a read.

In related news, the New York Times reported today that (surprise) the health insurance industry is balking at including the small business market in health care reform:

In other words, policy analysts and others say, unless the insurance industry is willing to give some of the same ground to small businesses that they have ceded to individual policy holders, a big part of what is wrong with the nation’s health care system may not get fixed.
More than 40 percent of the private American labor force works for companies with fewer than 100 workers. Leaving small businesses out of the federal effort to overhaul health care would be “a big hole in any reform proposal,” said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group that advocates significant changes to the current system.


As the president re-emphasized today, for-profit insurers need real competition from a public plan. Otherwise that kind of nonsense will continue.

No comments:

Post a Comment