re: #169 lawhawk

Lower overhead? How can you even make that supposition when any government program that provides health care, whether it’s the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, or Indian Health Services, all have sprawling bureaucracies.

Private insurers have operated as not-for-profits, and yet they too would get squeezed by a public option. A larger risk pool doesn’t necessarily lower costs but spreads the costs among a much larger group - for those who have no choice but to buy in (and that’s part of the tax and penalty provisions in the House and Senate versions), it would be a huge hit that might be mitigated by further credits and deductions for health care expenditures if they meet threshold levels for those credits/deductions.

It could be that a public option ends up acting as the substandard carrier, taking in all of the high-risk, high cost enrollees. Certainly, that is how the private carriers would want it to happen: they would want to cherry-pick the applicant pool to achieve that. preventing that behavior (which the bill would presumably outlaw) would be a regulatory challenge.