<i>Consumer Reports</i>: Opponents Say Public Plan Will Be Too Popular and Not Popular at All

: Opponents Say Public Plan Will Be Too Popular and Not Popular at All
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Hey, the folks at Consumer Reports/Consumers Union are in the vanguard of serious health care reform, have been so for years.

They're trying to counter some of the disinformation that bad guys are spreading.

Opponents of the public plan want to scare Americans, so maybe it
doesn't matter that the arguments are fundamentally contradictory--they
just need to be really scary.

On the one hand, opponents say a public plan option will be so
popular that it will "engulf" the private insurance market--repeatedly
citing the Lewin study that we've already discussed here.

What does that mean? You will like the public plan so much--because
you get better benefits for less money--that you will choose it over
the packages offered by private insurance companies.

At the same time, opponents also say a public plan option wouldn't pay
doctors enough, so your doctor wouldn't be there. Since millions of you
wouldn't buy a plan that your doctor refused to join, it hardly sounds
like something that would destroy the competing insurance market.

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