HELP’s Public Plan

The Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions committee has unveiled its vision for a public option in health insurance. As detailed by Igor Volsky this is not the “robust” public plan that would be able to piggyback on Medicare rates and force cost savings. Instead, it’s along the lines of Chuck Schumer’s “level playing field” concept. This version of the idea still has important merits, but does leave a lot of potential advantages on the playing field.

Insofar as we seem likely to go down this route, it becomes all the more vital to have the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services use payment reform to both make the existing public programs more efficient and also to drive systemic change throughout both the public and private sides of the system.