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Update: DeLong explains Krugman to Mankiw
I was planning to write a post about George Will’s absurd column claiming that America’s health care system is working just fine. The rich and fully covered Will writes that the best reform is to leave it alone.
Anyone who thinks that our health care system is okay is simply too selfishly rich to care about everyone else, just not paying attention to the mounting horror stories, or being disingenuous. Take your pick.
Will already blew his credibility on this topic last week, and today he starts his argument by relying on Betsy McCaughey, a discredited shill for Big Pharma who openly solicited Pharma’s business by appealing to their desire to kill genuine reforms.
It’s another thing entirely when a Harvard Economics Professor, Greg Mankiw, warns us of The Pitfalls of a Public Plan. Mankiw asserts the public plan will be so heavily subsidized by the government as to drive private insurers out of business, which would be bad.
Scarecrows don’t usually debate Harvard economists, at least not successfully, but I remembered Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and others have often expressed dismay at some economists, in particular about what they call "the Great Ignorance" — revealed during the stimulus debates — of prominent economists forgetting or not knowing what their predecessors figured out decades ago.
Mankiw begins from the premise that we have many competitors and no competitive problem in the current insurance/provider industry, and that we wouldn’t think of adding a public grocery store to compete in the grocery business. Thus, the Harvard man concludes, introducing a government sponsored and likely subsidized health plan would produce worse results once it inevitably became the monopoly – higher prices, shortages, rationing, etc, not to mention having Obama come between you and your non-socialist doctor.
I respect good economists, having worked with several excellent ones, especially ones who accurately describe the market they’re analyzing. But Mankiw didn’t mention that numerous studies have shown the health insurance industry is so highly concentrated that the top two or three insurers control a huge share of the market in virtually every state. Studies also show that prices are not set by efficient competition but instead by a dominant price leader, just as economic text books would predict.
These very relevant conditions would mean the current system without the public option leads to lower quality and/or inadequate coverage and higher, uncompetitive prices, exactly the conditions we have today but which neither Will not Mankiw notice. Those conditions might also explain why several advanced countries have some variation of a government-sponsored national health care system that covers everyone and does so with equal or better care at only half to two-thirds the cost we pay.
To a scarecrow, these seem like important data. But in describing the current system, and comparing it to grocery stores, Mankiw doesn’t mention any of these facts.
Nor does he mention companion proposals for government oversight and regulation of the exchange, which would set the qualifications for all plans and the market rules in which the public plan and other options would be offered. This makes sense because once you acknowledge the facts Mankiw ignores, you’re left wondering if this is a competitive market or something that most textbooks recognize as requiring significant regulation to ensure quality, adequacy and sustainable prices. Mankiw doesn’t assume any of that, nor does he acknowledge any of the documented abuses that spring from the perverse incentives inherent in the current for-profit system.
Fortunately, Paul Krugman had similar concerns, but expressed them more clearly, and after all, he’s a decent economist. In Health Care is Not a Bowl of Cherries, he responds to Mankiw:
Both George Will and Greg Mankiw basically argue that we don’t need a government role because we can trust the market to work — hey, we do it for groceries, right?
Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.
Those who follow Krugman, DeLong and other economist blogs know that in several posts over recent months, Krugman and DeLong have been rolling their eyes at economists succumbing to talking points and what they call "The Great Ignorance."
But now Krugman is pointing out that the Great Ignorance has joined forces with the Great Disingenuous, and together they form the basis for the Republican/industry arguments for protecting the status quo, and those who profit from it, and against reform.
More
Health Reform Watch, The Unconventional Economics of Health Care and The Rationing Scare
Yglesias, Canadian Conservative defends single-payer national health care
NYT editorial, Insurance company schemes
TPM, Good summary of the HCAN study of industry concentration
48 Comments
I don’t know about government groceries, but there exists a sort of ‘government restaurant’ in many cities, the food is very basic (Taxpayers are fucking cheapskates IMHO) but the price is right!
I think it is worse than Krugman says. All standard economic theory depends on there being a stable market equilibrium where demand equals supply. Arrow’s paper discusses the problems caused by imperfect information, moral hazard, and adverse selection, assuming that a market equilibrium exists.
Joseph Stigltiz and Michael Rothschild wrote a famous paper 33 ago that showed that in many cases no market equilibrium on insurance markets can exist. The problem of characterizing when equilibirum does and does not exist in insurance markets is still unsolved, and can be termed an officieal “famous unsolved problem” in economics.
I did a looksee recently to see what the status was. If you use a totally different approach to defining equilibrium, you can solve it, but that is kind of cheat, since it seems to only proposed for insurance markets and nothing else (that is, it is a kluge of unknown empirical relevance). If the losses from non- or underinsurance for a year or so are small, then repeated insurance contracts for limited time spans can solve the problem (say, auto insurance, where the losses of not driving for a few years are relatively small in the big scheme of things). If you can separate out different hazards and insure for different types, the problem can be solved (say, fire, flood, earthquake, etc. insurance for your house).
None of these solutions seem OK to me for health care.
I do not think that either single payer or public option are strictly necessary to solve the health care problem in the U.S. Like Switzerland or the Netherlands, we could make do with mostly private insurance. But the regulations have to be very heavy, and designed to insure one of the kinds of stable equilibrium identified by Stiglitz and Rothschild exist. This would include same basic policy for all, all applicants must be insured, no cancellation of contracts except for explicitly stated conditions in the regulations, and public process for deciding on benefit design that all companies must adopt.
I think that public option is the only practical approach that will work in the U.S. with current messed up political system.
The probably lack of stable equilibrium in the health insurance market makes me reluctant to protray the insurance industry or HMOs and intentionally evil from the get go. They may well be operating in a systme that produces unpredictable chaotic results over time. So, they are constantly improvising and taking dubious measures to try to salvage their sustainability, profitability whatever. But this produces a desparate mentality that eventually results in them doing bad things to stay afloat, and not being very bothered about it. Hence, perhaps, the very unrepetant attitude of insurance companies toward ruthless recission programs, that have little to with intentional fraud by enrollees.
If I were a Congressman at that hearing, I would have proposed to the insurance execs, that they be willing to live by the same contract law (that allowed their recission programs) being applied to them across the board. It would have been interesting to see their reaction.
Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information. Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 90, No. 4, (Nov., 1976), pp. 629-649
Scarecrow wrote:
Who says it is “inevitable” that the ‘public option’ would become a monopoly? Where’s the proof of that?
The Harvard man is just using a typical Republican technique: set up a really stupid strawman and then burn it down?
How about comparing the current ‘free market’ system (and it’s outcomes) to the same with a public option added? If the gov’t doesn’t adversely harm the private part, then how could this be worse than what we already have?
Something bothered me about the wording in my comment above, and now I realize what it is.
“designed to insure one of the kinds of stable equilibrium identified by Stiglitz and Rothschild exist.”
is wrong. It should read
“designed to insure one of the kinds of good but unstable equilibrium identified by Stiglitz and Rothschild exists and is stable (because of the regulations).”
A great, compact piece of analysis that ties together all sorts of pieces. Thank you.
Makiw is an idiot. He was the chair of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005 or smack in the middle of the housing bubble.
I looked at his wiki and he is described as a New Keynesian. A New Keynesian really isn’t a Keynesian at all, sort of in the same way a neoliberal economist is not a liberal economist. Anyway, my understanding is that New Keynesians look to monetary policy to bring the economy back into equilibrium. The current financial meltdown completely blew the theoretical foundations of this economic school out of the water. (The Japanese financial crisis should have a long time ago.) Bernanke took the Fed rate to zero and greatly expanded its balance sheet, and, let’s see, nothing happened. Oopsie, there, Mankiw. This same kind of thinking that increasing the money supply alone will solve our problems is why morons like Mankiw don’t like fiscal stimulus but do like tax cuts even in the face of deficits and a collapsing economy.
Like a great many of our current crop of tenured economics faculty, Mankiw has been wrong on virtually every economics issue he has come near. Why should healthcare be any different?
I suppose the (rhetorical) question is why does the NYT publish the views of these nutcases? Answer: because shills of the Establishment have to stick together
Suddenly remembered something else: the problem of non-existence of equilibrium in many types of insurance markets is, for health care, directly related to ‘cream skimming.’ The problem arises when there are two types of risks, healthy and unhealthy (unhealthy would be history of heart attack or diagnosis of diabetes) and a significant proportion of the population is unhealthy.
Company A starts with an equilibrium that pools everybody with same premium. Insurance company B can do better by designing a policy that is at least as good for the healthy but either denies insurance to the unhealthy or puts them into an unhealthy policy with higher rates.
Thing is that whatever B does, company C can come by and do the same thing to B. And this goes on until there is essentially no insurance except perhpas for the healthiest.
It has also been called the health insurance ‘death spiral’. So, I think there is historical evidence that health insurance is one of the insurance markets where the standard economic analysis does just not apply. Also interesting that not one developed economy in Europe, Asia, or Canada, or more developed in Latin America, or even developing or emerging economies in Europe (eg, Baltics, which are purported to be very pro-free market) has adopted what the U.S. conservatives would consider an acceptably free market solution for health care. That is like over 30 countries -why is there not one example of a successful free market healthcare market?
Also, the idea that the Baltics are acceptably “free market” in any other area by U.S. conservative standards is false -it is just some silly propaganda.
the gist of the problem is the for-profit health-insurance industry is a cancerous cyst growing in the belly of the body politic and needs to be excised and replaced with a public non-profit co-op ..
why are doctors and dentists scarce here when they’re a dime a dozen in mexico ..?? makes no sense to me …
Oops, I am probably getting obnoxious. But the key to the problem is when health status is difficult to observe from the outside. When the person who wants to be insured has lots more information about health status than anyone else. Rothschild and Stiglitz showed that when an equilibrium did not exist it results in loss of welfare from the equilibrium where everyone is insured at some rate or other.
” in December 1992 that Mankiw startled the textbook world by leaving the publisher of his intermediate macroeconomics text to write in introductory text for a rival firm, for a $1.4 million advance, or roughly three times the previous record for a college text… “
This is from an article “Prof. Releases New Textbook, Poor Students Cower in Fear” by James Yu
http://www.ivygateblog.com/200…..r-in-fear/
Mankiw is an equal opportunity oppressor.
a very nice piece of writing, Scarecrow. rec.
highly informative for those of us struggling to keep up
PAULZILLA !
Wondeful comment, which I urge you to post in Oxdown. Special thanks for highlighting the Stiglitz paper, which I noticed in tracking down Krugman’s link to Arrow, but had not read.
Again, the core of your comment deserves it’s own Oxdown post.
It’s a fair point, though my friends prefer you not refer to them as “stupid strawmen.” They’re sensitive about that.
The “cream skimming” issue is really important, and I’ve been touching on it in several posts when talking about what a public plan has to do (and what the exchange rules must require for all plans). But suppose there were an industry-wide rule that no plan can cream skim (assume we know how to write that) — every plan has to be open to every person, regardless of health status, prior conditions, etc. And then you asked, what happens to the employer-based system?
It occurred to me that employers would then have an incentive to do the cream-skimming for the insurers, simply by how they chose and retained employees. Adverse selection would then push high-health-cost employees out of some jobs, to lower employer contributions. It’s not clear that employer Pay or Play rules would solve this, though Jacob Hacker has been working on such rules.
If this logic is correct, then the employer-based system may itself have to be replaced, which is why in my recent posts I’ve said it is a mistake for Congress to be trying to preserve that system so that they can avoid having to subsidize too may people getting coverage and subsidies via the Exchange.
Obama wants to “build on what works, fix what’s broken,” and that may be a winnable political strategy. Other Dems go further in saying we have to make sure the rules don’t cause or induce people to leave the current system, which is a perversion of the principle. I’m saying, we ought to design a system that we know inevitably leads people away from a system that isn’t working, and for the reasons you describe, probably can’t be made to work — to get to anything approaching equilibrium.
Or to put it another way, we may be describing something analogous to a natural monopoly condition, which would explain why every other country came to the conclusion that a national health care system, and not a profit-based competitive system, was the right answer.
Again, I urge you to take these concepts and start laying them out in Oxdown. Good stuff.
First rule for non-economist scarecrows: never enter a debate without a good economist.
Second rule: choose your economist wisely.
near the top of my list of problems with proposals for a public plan in a multi payer system (vs single payer which doesn’t have this issue).
Yes, and notice that the rescission problem is a function of the knowledge issue, in which patients have the incentive not to reveal what they know about their own health at the time they obtain insurance. Then when the get sick, the insurance companies have an incentive to dig it up, at exactly the time when the insurance is most necessary. The natural incentives lead to a terrible outcome.
this strikes me as another version of “suppose there was a can opener?”
….
seriously, what would such a thing look like? i’ve been asking for months, not because i’m trying to be a pain in the ass but because i can’t imagine the rules (and enforcement) that could get us there with the actual insurance industry we have.
the only thing i’ve gotten from reading hacker is that maybe there is some way to do it with risk adjustments. i don’t see it, so i’ve been asking about that for months too. no answer on that one yet either, so my level of doubts are very high.
I think you and I both agree where the logic leads, but it’s important to go down every one of these blind alleys and show that they are dead ends.
ah, i keep thinking maybe there is something i’m missing that will make the whole public-plan-in-a-multi-payer-system make sense to me (because right now it really just doesn’t).
….
re the employer based system alley. i’m ready to pitch that for any number of reasons, but near the top is that employer based health insurance makes for lousy industrial policy (especially in manufacturing).
Remarkably ignorant or disingenuous is being kind. Mankiw’s column reads like a paid advert. Let’s ask who’s funding his work in or outside Harvard. We know the industry is accumulating a half billion dollar anti-public option war chest. That would pay for lots of Ivy League economists.
Mankiw’s piece suffers from a multitude of problems. He doesn’t distinguish between taxpayer revenues paying for administrative costs to run a public insurer as an institution from taxpayer subsidies. And what does he include as a “subsidy”.
It’s common to pool a large group, in this case, all taxpayers, if the business model is to charge the same premium to all participants. That’s how employer paid insurance does. Is that a “subsidy” to Mankiw?
A credible public insurer would be prohibited from paying Wall Street-like salaries to multi-tiers of top managers. They would be paid government scale for a 9-5 job. Is that a subsidy or a larger version of the “co-op” model the Right is touting in an effort to derail a public plan large enough to make a difference.
A credible public plan would subsidize those too poor or out of work and help them pay that premium. How is that harmful to private insurers, if those people are too poor or have too many health problems to buy insurance individually or through their employer? Those are not customers private insurers compete for.
Apart from two or three players being dominant in each market and setting price and other terms, health care suffers from other structural ills exacerbated by private insurers. Like life insurers, health insurers share information widely, much more so than health care providers. As do airlines, they silently or overtly set common terms, from procedural bottlenecks to excluding “preexisting conditions”, to charging significantly higher rates to non-group participants, to evaluating them based on zip code, income, credit rating and other purported risk factors. Available contract terms and rates are common across the board, as are practices such as dropping customers who actually use their insurance.
Which means that there is little effective competition. Even if there were, how much choice has any individual? Those who have health insurance through their employer get what their employer chooses. Those who insure privately get what they can obtain or afford, confronting common practices and price structures. There is NO opportunity to negotiate price or terms, let alone are there markedly different products to choose from. And where’s that common information base competition theory assumes buyers can access and use to make informed choices? It doesn’t exist.
Private insurers make their products available largely to those healthy, productive and the right age to be employed by enterprises still willing and profitable enough to provide health insurance. They fail to cover 45 million Americans and a similar number have too little insurance to cover their needs. Even more people choose not to use their insurance because it might document a preexisting condition. Should they change jobs, willingly or unwillingly, or become self-employed, that condition would be excluded from coverage or potentially significantly increase their premiums. If the head of household can’t get coverage, his or her family can’t get coverage, even if their risks are markedly different.
All of which is testament to the exceedingly poor job private insurers do to cover the health care needs of Americans. Anyway, that’s not their job; making money is their job. That’s a structural problem and it requires a structural solution. Mr. Mankiw is advocating for the status quo because its current players make more money the way things are.
Real life shows that when people become sick they don’t care about the economic substructure of their health care they would just like to be healed when possible…how much did Jesus charge per patient?
Sorry to be OT but Madoff was sentenced to 150 years! He was heard to mutter on being led from the courtroom, “I go that that time standing on my head.”
The people who believe that alley isn’t blind keep using the phrase “assigned risk.”
I can pretty well imagine what that means and why it wouldn’t work, but I’ve not had time to give it really serious consideration.
A Hullabaloo commenter put it nicely not too long ago:
I don’t want some faceless government bureaucrat deciding what medical procedures I get to have. I want that to be decided by a faceless HMO bureaucrat who gets paid a bonus for fucking me out of the insurance I paid for, with shareholders standing over his shoulder telling him how to fuck me harder.
The Fankor | 06.20.09 – 3:39 am | #
http://www.haloscan.com/commen…..58/#883611
What CalGeorge said.
Mankiw’s form of idiocy has been deconstructed over and over again for years at Brad DeLong’s site.
As we all know just because someone has a position at a prestigious university doesn’t mean their ideas are necessarily good. Look at how long Milton Friedman was able to pull off his brand of dishonesty at Chicago and, a more recent case, the eminent war criminal John Yoo has a position at Berkeley where DeLong teaches economics.
Scarecrow….. every time you think of George Will please do it from this point of view….. My boyfriend travels a lot around 140K/year so he sees a lot of people at airports…… His George Will gate sighting….just last year
Elmore entering the gate area found this guy on his hands and knees cutting articles out of newspapers…… he had holes in his shoes, threadbare pant cuffs and shedding a cloud of dandruff everywhere……
Now think about this…. this guy makes big money, he wears worn out clothes and shoes to travel. AND he is using dead tree press as some sort of source…..
Dean Baker ’s main thesis is that some jobs are protected and others left to the “free market” aka outsourcing. U.S. doctors are protected although they do let in the greedy doctors from other countries who aren’t allowed to make sh*t loads of money in their own countries so come here to rake in the dough.
We also need to get greed out of the health care system by making it non-profit again, a public utility. The New Yorker article “The Cost Conundrum” addresses the greed factor. Pay people to become doctors and make them spend 5 years in rural and poor areas. Then we don’t have to hear doctors say that they have to become specialists to pay off their $250,000 college debt.
Just remember that some of us will NEVER be cream….. I’m the scum on the bottom and if things are Not done right…… first they will never offer cancer patients insurance but if they are forced to….. the rates will be beyond anyone ability to pay.
I’m the person none of the industry wants ……
Given the way our country allocates its resources providing rich women with big boobs is more valuable than making people healthy.
You are neither scum nor alone.
We’re all in the same pitcher of milk, just one incident away.
Just wanted to add that “cream skimming” is also referred to as “cherrypicking” in the healthcare industry. Our current system if you could call it that puts older sicker people into a government program. It is called Medicare. If private plans had to pick up these people and offer them healthcare at competitive rates they would be screaming. What private insurers do and have done for decades now is select younger healthier customers whose companies are willing to pay higher prices for good healthcare. But even here to maximize profits insurers have no compunction to withdraw from an area if there profits are in any way threatened. They also have no problem pealing off sicker people in their plans or denying them treatment even where indicated.
Incredibly helpful post and thread. Blessings and thanks to all
I saw this woman interviewed on WSJ Report a couple of weeks back. She claimed that “preventive care was not cost effective” and gave as an example that “most woman who have mammograms will never have breast cancer.”
Sounds like a powerful argument that every woman should have mammograms.
I think you have it completely wrong, because you are starting from theory(which is fine)not from facts (which is essential). I suggest you read Uwe Reinhart’s work on how the health system really works. It is a scam, and the most profitable one in America now that stealing from people by banking is in a temporary recession. Reinhart is where Krugman is getting his information. They are friends at Princeton (and of mine).
On the so-called 45 million uninsured. This is a stock, not a flow figure. The number of persons who fall into that stock is a lot higher (because some people leave it — by findng some minimal insurance or just dying off, which from the industry point of view is most efficient since their taxes don’t have to go to supporting them.
My comment was intended to show what theory really says about insurance markets, and how the facts and figures will have a very different interpretation with a sound understanding of theory compared to an unjustified assertion that competitive insurance markets work pretty much like those for door stops, snowcones, and widgets.
I don’t think I say anything that contradicts Uwe Reinhart’s opinions on the U.S. health care system. For example, one way out of the problem of nonexistence of competitive equilibrium is for a firm to gain (or grab, or find the financial resources to buy) market power. If you have a few insurers with market power who can set prices, there is greater chance that some kind of stable equilibrium can exist.
If you look at Talkingpointsmemo today, they link to a report that finds market power probably exists in most local insurance markets in the U.S. But this means that much of what the unsurance industry calls profits are really transfers of income from the insured to the industry. And that is one of Uwe Reinhardt’s conclusions -that the U.S. healthcare system is not really costly in terms of real resources it consumes. It is costly in the sense that most players have market power with very little regulation on the monopolistic pricing, and it functions as a kind of private taxation system that moves income and wealth from the rest of the population into the owners of the insurance companies and health care providers.
The lack of competitive equilibrium helps explains how this can easily happen (though I did not go into this part of the story in my original comment).
in Will’s column last week, he argued that the 45 million is not that big a concern because many millions are simply in voluntary transition between jobs, while others are recent immigrants and others who could be eligible but haven’t bothered to sign up, so the core figure is much lower. In my response, I didn’t have time to check for analysis of the core figures, but if you’ve seen a study, I’d appreciate a link.
wrt to wesgpc, I think you’ve misread the argument he’s responding to, and i agree that his discussion of the theory and literature on the flawed markets for health are important, especially when we’re taking on an economist quoting theory back to us, but misusing it.
Everything has a value. The value or cost is determined by what people (the market) will pay for it. For the government to get involved in almost anything affects this basic formula. Health care costs became higher after government stepped in and forced hospitals to treat anyone who came in regardless of ability to pay. This is all well and good but there is a cost. The people who can’t afford treatment and service get it for free with this phantom debt over them and the costs are then balanced over those who can pay. That is the price of living in this country.
Americans need to get back to the basics and actually understand basic money rules. Government coming in and forcing a higher wage doesn’t help because the cost of the final product goes up and margins diminish and growth and innovation wither. A person should be paid for what is in line with the money that they bring in for what they provide in work. To expect the government to pay for this or that and think our problems will be solved is foolish at best. We must take full responsibility on ourselves and do what we must to survive, because at the core of any situation all you can count on is yourself.
Demanding that our government be responsive to our needs, health care included – and that it reallocate its spending to do so – IS taking care of ourselves. Anything less is giving our pocketbooks to those whose wallets we make bigger by doing so.
It is no different than participating in a barn raising because our family expects similar help sometime in the future and because we expect the barn to be used by one of the community, not by some out-of-town huckster.
The whole thing about private insurers being driven out of business is easily defeated by discussing, say, Australian health care, where we have single payer plus a private insurance industry. The former covers everyone, paid for by a hypothecated, slightly progressive, tax, while the latter offers competitively priced access to more fancy care and of course quicker access to services that are rationed or not available in the public service. The government incentivises the use of insurance, to lessen the burden of health care on the public purse (or so it claims). Health care in Australia is, I should note, excellent on the whole.
Burn here! Burn now! LOL
Seems like destructive prejudicial behavior to me. Has anyone ever sued them on that basis?
Gov’t ought to eliminate that. I can more easily accept letting insurers have an analysis of one’s DNA (to let them know about your predispositions) than to let them know you have diabetes or cancer or even a broken arm.
They’re free to charge more for having to deal with patients of dubious health. They already charge too much, enough to cover all those patients they regularly reject! If they want to charge more it’ll make their competition against the public option all that much tougher.
Actually, that’s probably true, because the government and the insurers push the idea of having every woman get mammograms at regular intervals, even though the odds are, in fact, in favor of her never getting cancer.
Although, having had a couple, I can’t see why anyone would willingly do it if they aren’t high-risk. (Read this to understand why!)
There was a commenter at TPM arguing that people without insurance are choosing to be uninsured, because everyone can afford insurance. Clearly it’s someone who’s never worked for less than $30 an hour (or its annual equivalent), with low rent and minimal expenses for everything else ….
Except that DNA testing isn’t actually useful for that purpose. They’d get better predictions from good patient/family histories, which any doctor should be able to do at no additional cost.
Up on talkingpointsmemo front page at the moment. Unbelievable:
HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL
Snowe: Public Option Would Be Too Cheap For Consumers!
“If you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market … [it] will have significant price advantages,” Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) told the AP. She raised the idea of a “trigger mechanism” that would delay — possibly indefinitely — any public option.