It's a little offtopic, but this reminds me of Lessig's "the corrupting influence of money is the first problem facing this nation. That unless we solve this problem, we won’t solve anything else."
In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much as a nation on the whole, and could have possibly worked out to great advantage, but was not going to happen because health insurance companies are too powerful for that sort of thing to get through.
> In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much as a nation on the whole, and could have possibly worked out to great advantage, but was not going to happen because health insurance companies are too powerful for that sort of thing to get through.
The only public option that would have gone through would have been one that the insurance companies blessed, whereby there were the mediators of all the payments. Which is basically what we got.
If you solve the money problem you can solve a lot of problems, but until you solve the money problem few or none of the rest of these problems will get solved.
> In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much ...
If you look at the margins the insurers are using (the maximum a public option might be cheaper), they're not much. 10% is rare. Given government inefficiency, I'd expect a public option to have been at least as expensive, and probably more expensive.
In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much as a nation on the whole, and could have possibly worked out to great advantage, but was not going to happen because health insurance companies are too powerful for that sort of thing to get through.