A Public Health Insurance Plan

I am an elected trustee in the Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, and I am a Democrat. I recently developed an open letter supporting the so-called public option in the health reform legislation now before Congress. I invited other elected Democrats from county, town, and local government near my home to co-sign the letter, and many did. This was focused on the Senate Finance Committee, but the legislative process has moved on, and the fate of the public option will be determined on the floor of the House and Senate. Much will depend on the active role President Obama may or may not take in the weeks ahead.

I don't support a compromise approach that "triggers" a public option if the private insurance market fails to perform well. This is not a compromise really. It is a political strategy of misdirection that distracts attention from an important innovation and shunts it aside until a tomorrow that will never come, a tomorrow when it can be neutralized bureaucratically and quietly after the public is no longer attentive. I venture the guess that the trigger will never be pulled, for the public option will be buried in a cloud of data and spurious disagreement about how well private insurance is actually performing.

In most other developed nations of the world, this aspect of the American health reform debate would seem crazy and upside down. We should not be debating whether or not to have a public insurance option; we should be debating whether there should be any private insurance options allowed. But in so many ways these past few months of health reform "debate" have shown the immaturity and ignorance of American politics. Didn't President Obama's resounding election say that we are tired of this kind of politics, this kind of misinformation, this kind of rhetoric? His message then aroused a large contingent of citizens who rejected the public philosophy of the Bush years and who sought a new kind of pragmatism and healing reasonableness. I among them. Where have we all gone? Time to get back in the fray.

Below is the text of my letter:

An Open Letter to The Honorable Max Baucus, Chair, and Democratic Members of the Senate Finance Committee

Dear Senator Baucus:

We are Democratic elected officials from the Town of Greenburgh, New York and its incorporated Villages. We urge you to include a public health insurance option in the health reform legislation that Congress will enact. Please include this element in the bill you report out of the Senate Finance Committee and support this provision in legislation enacted eventually by the Senate.

As Democratic office holders and as citizens, we are following with great concern the health reform initiative. Under the leadership of the late Senator Edward Kennedy and others over many decades, the Democratic Party has made a commitment to the American people to repair a damaged health care system marred by both inefficiency and inequity. Those of us who serve in local government, close to the grassroots problems and hopes of our constituents, look to you as stewards of that commitment.

Without the innovation of a public option in the health insurance marketplace, health reform will be incomplete and will fall short of its promise. The public option will enhance consumer choice, not diminish it. The public option will build into market competition itself powerful incentives to provide better affordability, value, and quality health care. Without such a competitive public option, the entire burden of protecting Americans when illness makes them most vulnerable will fall to government regulation. The public option, working in tandem with important regulatory requirements on insurance carriers, will put a new accountability into the health care marketplace.

Please include the public option provision in your bill, and support it throughout the remaining legislative process.

Sincerely yours,

[Listing of signatories to follow]

Bruce Jennings

Trustee

Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY