As the health-care fights gets underway for real in Washington this week, the entire Republican side of the Senate Finance Committee has sent a letter to the president expressing opposition to the centerpiece of the Obama plan: the so-called “public option” that would create a new government health insurance system that will supposedly compete with the existing private system. “One of the more divisive issues in the health care reform debate is the creation of a brand new public health insurance option,” the letter says:
At a time when major government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are already on a path to fiscal insolvency, creating a brand new government program will not only worsen our long term financial outlook but also negatively impact American families who enjoy the private coverage of their choice…
Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers. Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition….The end result would be a federal government takeover of our healthcare system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy.
