As part of President Obama’s push to reform health care, he has made it clear that he supports creating a public plan that would compete with private health insurance plans. In response, the health insurance lobby group AHIP has insisted that such competition would be “potentially lethal” to their industry. Republican Conference Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is now making their arguments for them, likening the competition between private and public health insurance to mice trying to compete with an elephant:
“It’s a big problem,” Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) said. “It’s like putting an elephant in the room with some mice and saying, ‘Okay fellas, compete.’ There wouldn’t be any mice left after a while.”
Alexander’s nonsensical analogy aside, Igor Volsky recently explained the actual impact of having a competing public plan, writing, “In an environment where private plans are forced to compete with a new efficient public program, inefficient, over-bloated insurers will go out of business, but private plans with good networks of providers or better services will continue attracting new enrollees.”