Consumer Reports: Opponents Say Public Plan Will Be Too Popular and Not Popular at All

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.

Check out Opponents say public plan will be too popular and not popular at all

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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Comments

[wendy82551]

BTW, I went to the article cited in your article. This statement pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
"If insurance companies want to keep playing games with rates and benefits, you will always have a reliable public alternative to turn to. But if they play straight with you, you will have no reason to leave."

[wendy82551]

They'll argue anything to kill the public option, won't they? Unfortunately, the average American either doesn't have the attention span, or is too busy working to survive to notice the contradictory logic. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, very starkly.

[Dystopic]

this country has never been a logical country ... the citizenry believes that their invisible imaginary friend will protect them, and actually protect them from demons.

more people believe in angels than evolution

Logic was the tool of the enlightenment that brought us this country, but those ideas are just words now, destroyed by the most illogical of all things - Religious Fundamentalists