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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (118640)	8/18/2009 2:23:46 PM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Respond to of 541955

J: Lots of questions leap to mind. 1. Is Blue Cross/Blue Shield eligible? Because it is a non-profit, as I recall. 2. Can they scale up to effectively bargain for drug prices, hospital prices, doctor prices, you name it? 3. Related. Can there be national co-ops? 4. What are the likely mechanisms that would enforce price and eligibility discipline on private insurance? No doubt I'll have more if this stuff gets taken seriously. V: Yup, those are the questions alright. 1. My understanding that BC/BS is kind of a mixed animal--maybe non-profit in terms of not having to answer to shareholders, but underwriting in the same manner as private insurers so that all the poor risks don't get dumped on them. I think the goal in the health care plan is to make insurers take all the people that apply to them and limit what they can charge for this. Maybe I can Wharf to check my facts here as I am a lazy SOB. I think BC/BS would be in competition with the Co-ops. 2. Well, you can see that Conrad envisioned scaling up to 12 million people which should certainly be a large enough pool to work with in this concept. The thing being could it be done quickly enough? Jury's probably out on this. 3. I think they are talking about regional Co-ops and this makes more sense from the standpoint of having to deal with the range of costs involved in differing regions. 4. Well, I think the idea is that the non-profits could offer a lower pricing range because they are non-profits thus causing the competition to adjust.