Posted by
voice_of_reason on Sunday, September 06, 2009 10:45:55 AM
It is becoming clear that the Public Option in ObamaCare has met with significant resistance from the American Public. Supporters of Govt run HealthCare are now preparing a Trojan Horse called Govt sponsored HealthCare cooperatives.
CNN has dutifully jumped on board! Today, on their State of the Union program, CNN's John King was busy interviewing diary farmers and others who pool their resources in the form of cooperatives to buy materials such as fertilizer or feed. Clearly, cooperatives of this kind are successful for the farmers and they do play an important competitive role.
By extrapolating on the warm, fuzzy kum-bah-yah connotations of the word 'cooperative', it is quite possible that ObamaCare supporters will be able to evade the all-important qualifier "Government sponsored".
A private cooperative that is formed by free individuals for the purposes of pooling their purchasing power (or their sales/marketing channel) is considerably different from one that is funded by the Government.
* the taxpayer is not on the hook, should a private cooperative fail.
* private cooperatives can be easily dissolved - they can never be deemed 'too big to fail'
* private cooperatives can negotiate with (but can't coerce) providers - who remain free to set their own terms
Private cooperatives, formed by voluntary action of free individuals, often serve a legitimate purpose.
However, a Government sponsored cooperative is a contradiction in terms. Why should money - extorted from all tax payers - be used to subsidize the health insurance costs of some citizens? Why should tax payer funds be used to coerce providers (who are also tax payers) to provide their services at a lower cost? This proposal fails both the fairness test AND the pragmatism test.
If support for Govt sponsored HealthCare cooperatives is passed - as a bipartisan compromise - this fall, it will morph into a Public Option very quickly. Conservatives, who have successfully stopped the Public Option (for now) must recognize this as a Trojan Horse and rally to defeat it.