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Recently, there's been renewed interest in reviving the "public option." Loosely, the public option is a policy proposal to create a giant government-run health insurer that would compete with private insurers. The rationale behind it is that a publicly run insurance company would be able to operate on lower overhead and provide health coverage significantly cheaper than private insurers.
The idea, which was dreamed up by Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker, first really came to public attention when it was bandied about in the run-up to Obamacare, before being dropped as too radical. However, with the Obamacare insurance exchanges in a precarious position because private insurers are losing money and dropping out of the system, President Obama has renewed calls for a "public option" to provide insurance coverage. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has also come out in support of a public option, in part because she was pushed to the left on health in her bruising primary with socialist Bernie Sanders. (Sanders called his program "Medicare for all," and Hacker calls the public option " Medicare-like.") And just today, Hacker has an op-ed at the New York Times touting the public option as the cure to what aiils Obamacare.
There are a great many obvious reasons to oppose the public option. Perhaps the most neglected reason to oppose it is that the people arguing for the public option aren't telling the truth, because what they really want is not a publicly funded insurance plan that's serves as an alternative to private insurance. They want to crowd private insurers out of the marketplace altogether, leaving the government as the sole provider of health care, a.k.a. a "single-payer" system. Despite the obvious evidence that this is what they want, they insist that the public option is some sort of sensible middle ground and not the radical proposal to destroy private insurance that it is.
Now watch this video from Jacob Hacker, "father of the public option," speaking at the Tides Foundation in 2008:
Someone once said to me, 'Well, this is a Trojan horse for single payer.' Well, it's not a Trojan horse, right? It's just right there! I'm telling you, we're going to get there over time, slowly, but we'll move away from reliance on employment based health insurance as we should. But we're going to do it in a way that we're not going to frighten people into thinking that they're going to lose their private insurance.
