Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Scott Lemieux isn’t happy with the compromise healthcare bill being put together in the Senate:

The normal justification for passing a compromise bill is that once a new system is entrenched it can be tweaked later. But I don’t think it applies in this case. The public option is the core of the reform; a Blue Dog bill isn’t so much half a loaf as a few meaningless crumbs. And far from making a public option more viable in the future, if anything, passing something that could be called health-care reform will reduce the impetus to pass actual reform. And, worse, a bill with no public option will further entrench the insurance industry and make it easier for them to block actual reform in the future.

Ezra Klein disagrees.  Partly this is because a public option would cover only a small fraction of the currently uninsured (“That’s not a gamechanger, it’s a tweak”), but mostly because he thinks what really matters isn’t how they’re covered, but merely that they’re covered:

What has kept health-care reform at the forefront of liberal politics for decades is moral outrage that 47 million of our friends and neighbors are uninsured. That medical costs are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the United States. That an unemployed machinist gets screwed by fly-by-night insurance schemes while a comfortably employed banker need never worry. That the working class ends up in emergency rooms with crushing chest pains because they didn’t have health insurance and didn’t get prescribed cheap blood pressure medications five years before.

One of these days I need to think this through more rigorously, but I have a slightly more idiosyncratic view that’s closer to Ezra’s than Scott’s.  Both coverage and a public option are important, but I think what’s more important than either one is a simple change that — to my surprise — hasn’t attracted any real opposition: community rating on a national scale.  Basically, this means that insurance companies have to take all comers at the same price.  They’re allowed to adjust premiums for things like age and gender, but they can’t refuse you due to preexisting conditions.  If your blood pressure is high or you have a family history of breast cancer, they still have to accept your business.

This hardly solves every problem.  In particular, it doesn’t do much to rein in costs.  But if you combine (a) Medicare, (b) our current employer-based insurance regime, and (c) community rating along with subsidies for low-income families, you’ve essentially institutionalized universal healthcare insurance.  Not everyone will take advantage of it — there will always be a few people who go without coverage even if it’s affordable — and you still a need a few other things like out-of-pocket caps.  Still, it’s basically a statement that everyone in the country can and should be covered.  And once that becomes a cultural norm, it will never go away.

It will also, I suspect, eventually turn the private healthcare insurance industry on its head.  But maybe not.  That’s the part I haven’t thought through completely.  But if there’s any single thing that’s critical, it’s moving public opinion in the direction of viewing healthcare as a universal prerogative.  Community rating plus low-income subsidies doesn’t get us 100% there, but it gets us pretty far along.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate