This is a copy of the long reply that Maggie Mahar made to my post "Why Is Maggie Mahar Lying About Health Reform?" at TPMCafe. I’ve now gone through in turn and posted responses to her statements. I will not have time to do another round of replies, but hopefully this will be enough. I suggest that people show up to the Firedoglake book salon on November 9 and ask her to stop saying that the public "option" is anything at all like "Medicare E (for everyone)."

I am, of course, not lying about Health Care reform.

If you read CBO director Elmendorf’s letter to Charles Rangel where he suggests that only 30 million Americans will be in the h Exchange in 2019 (six years after reform begis) and that just 20% of the people eligible for the Insurance Exchange will choose the public plan, you would find that he has No basis for saying this. No numbers. No real analysis.

When Elmendorf explains why, in his opinion only 1/5 of the folks in the Exchange will choose the government plan, the paragraph is filled with "probably’s." (I will be publishing a post quoting that pargraph very soon.)

CMS estimated 40% compared to CBO’s 1/3 when the public option paid at Medicare rates. That leads me to conclude that while the CBO estimate may not be perfect, it’s probably not crazy either.

The truth is that No One can guess what percentage of millions of Americans will choose a public plan three years from now. We don’t know anything about the details of the public plan. Or the price. We know little about the private plans that will be competing.

Elmendorf is indulging in an exercise in mind-reading-guessing what millions of Americans will decide three years from now.

And when I heard that Elmendorf said only 30 million would be in the Exchange in 2019, and that the public plan would be tiny and more expensive than private plans, I wondered: how did he come up with those numbers?

So I went to the source where he laid out these figures, a letter he wrote to Rangel in late October. There I found all of the "probably’s"-
and no facts to justify his conclusion.

He just assumes that because the public plan is a governement plan, it "probably" will make no real effort to control costs or utilization-which makes no sense whatsoever. Medicare makes a real effort to control costs (see below) and going forward, Medicare plans to slash some fees beginning next year (see blow). The public plan will too.

CMS reached a very similar conclusion to CBO about utilization. It’s not just Elmendorf here.

Moreover, what we know with certainty is that a public family plan will be at least $2000 less expensive because it won’t have the private sector’s administratie costs. (This number is from Commonwealth.) The public plan will not have to lobby. It will not spend much (if anything) on marketing and advertising. EVeryone will know that it exists, and it will get much free advertising in the many,many stories that will be written about it in the press, on blogs, plus stories on television.

Commonwealth Fund talks about a completely different situation with an enormous public plan that takes up around half of the nation’s health insurance market. In my original post I pointed out Karen Davis’s statement on how different their study’s assumptions are from the bills now in Congress. You ignored it.

(Mahar did an article on the Commonwealth Fund report here. Somewhat shockingly because it directly contradicts her arguments below, at one point she says: "…in many cases, the doctors who treat them would be paid less. As a result, patients who choose the public sector plan might well have a hard time finding physicians willing to take their insurance…The private plans would have the funds needed to pay providers more and create "integrated networks," overcoming some of the fragmentation that leads to errors in our health care system. Quite simply, they would be able to offer better care." The emphasis is mine.)

The full and much longer version of this post is available on ZBlogs. You may need to click this link twice if they redirect you to the Emergency Funding Appeal.