Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
12/30/09
With several prominent House Democrats acknowledging that they will likely have to give up a public option for insurance coverage in health care reform negotiations with the Senate, the focus has shifted to what concessions they can extract in return.
The main issue on the radar is to try and ensure that newly created health insurance exchanges are national (the House version) and not state-based (the Senate version), say sources on and off the Hill.
“That’s where people are going to be looking,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) when asked if this would be the key compromise if the public option is dropped. “I’m going to give you my own view, which is the House view, which is that I think we need a federal insurance exchange…. I think we’ve got to look closely at this. I think that it’s much easier… to keep insurance companies in check — it is simpler to administer. We’re going to have a checkerboard here [with the Senate bill]. And also I think you have to take a look at the political reality. Implementing reform is going to be much more difficult in some states than in others.”…
…”The Senate is a weaker version, a more insurance-friendly version,” said one progressive health care activist. “The state-based exchanges are weaker on the structural level because you have less number of people in these exchanges. There would be more competition and lower prices in the national variety. But also, state-based exchanges would be a lot more subject to the insurance industry lobby.”
Diane Archer, the director of the Health Care Project at the Institute for America’s Future, also commented on the preference for a national exchange over the state variety in a small entry at the Washington Post’s Website.
“The single biggest weakness in the Senate bill is its reliance on states to implement the exchanges,” she writes. “The federal government should implement the law in a uniform way and relieve the states of the burden of setting up whole new insurance markets and regulatory structures — unless they choose to and demonstrate their ability to — as the House bill provides…
Mr. Stein’s article continues at The Huffington Post.
