Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-ND, wants to set up a government-sponsored national health care cooperative instead of the White House-backed “public option” that has become as welcome to many Americans as the swine flu. But Conrad is like a car dealer trying to resell old clunkers the government just paid him to destroy.
Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee chairman and an avowed proponent of the public option, admitted on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” that Conrad’s co-op proposal is merely “a political compromise, not a policy compromise” designed to lure moderates from both parties into supporting what is for all intents and purposes a public option in disguise. Indeed, former Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt points out in the Wall Street Journal that when Washington “provides the money, names the directors and ultimately pays the bills,” co-op is just another name for a federal takeover of the nation’s health care system.
There’s nothing wrong with real co-ops, which are non-profit organizations owned and controlled by co-op members. Such organizations have been around since the early 1800s. Blue Cross and Blue Shield actually started off as co-ops, and there are a handful of successful health care co-ops still operating today in several cities, including Minneapolis and Seattle.
But there’s a reason commercial insurers dominate the market today. Legions of health care co-ops started with public assistance during the Great Depression went belly-up when the federal government stopped subsidizing them. A major reason they failed once the government backing went away, according to the Government Accountability Office, was that the co-ops did not reduce their premiums for members. So in Florida, for example, 11 Community Health Purchasing Alliance CHPA co-ops that were started with government seed money to provide an insurance clearinghouse for small business owners and self-employed individuals went broke in only six years.
When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said “We’re going to have some type of public option, call it a ‘co-op,’ call it what you want…” he exposed the Democrats’ underhanded effort to call a government takeover of the health care system something that it is not. On Wall Street, they call this “putting lipstick on a pig.” Funded by the government and run by bureaucrats in Washington, not private members, Reid’s national co-op will be just another “take it or leave it” public option that will destroy private health insurance and leave consumers with no alternatives at all..
