http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aoZzDTXBzHXk Unlike most liberals, I'm okay with the opt out. In the end, few states will initally anyways and if it works, the voters will demand those states opt back in.
I'd love to see my state opt out, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Who would have thought you could get majority support for squeezing the rich to fund another "where my free shit" program?
Historically, all evidence suggests a public healthcare plan will make healthcare more expensive, less efficient, and less effective. I can't grasp why they're moving forward with it. (Well I can, but it is still a stupid idea.)
They won't quite be able to run the prescription drug shell game as other countries, but I'm sure the figures can be selectively hidden and fudged to make it look like a net, collective savings overall. The criticizm they always try to wiggle away from in TNZ is how, while the averaged per-capita cost might go down, it's almost a foregone conclusion that, for people like me who maintain steady employment and private health insurance, the total cost will go up, because I'll be looking at new taxes on top of my premiums. The responses I get to that, of course, are along the lines of "tough shit, social obligation, blah blah blah ".
Ah yes, the ever amorphous "public option." Back when Hacker originally came up with the idea, he included 5 principle tenets that must be part of it to work. There were others, but 5 of them were a sort of "must have." As of now, we have at best 2, maybe 3 of them. It really is kinda laughable at this point then IMO to call it the public option. Further, it would seem Dimocrats don't even bother to check this stuff, they just want the trinket of "public option". At this rate we might as well just call HSA's the "public option."
