There appears to be no limit to the number of lies and misrepresentations the unprincipled opportunist Joe Lieberman will embrace so the media will think Joe is "relevant."

CBS enabled Lieberman’s relevance by allowing him to lie repeatedly on Face the Nation; the inept Bob Schieffer never bothered to challenge any of Joe’s blatant falsehoods.

Lieberman’s most egregious falseholds involved his claims about the public option and his misrepresentation of the CBO analysis of how the public option would affect health insurance premiums.

Lieberman: I think that a public option will actually hurt the economic recovery, and our long-term fiscal situation, because it will end up causing the government to raise taxes, will probably raise premiums, or it will put us further into debt.

. . .

I want to be able to say yes . . . but I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement, the government going into the health insurance business, I think it’s such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote.

. . .

Schieffer: But is what you’re also saying, nothing is better than a government health insurance, a health insurance reform that includes a public option? Nothing is better than that?

Lieberman: Well, the truth is nothing is better than that, we ought to follow, if I may, the doctors’ oath in Congress as we deal with health reform.

I’m afraid, . . .

Amazingly, no one is talking about it. The Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday, when the House Democrats put out their health care reform plan with a public option, that the public plan would end up charging higher premiums than the average premiums charged by the commercial health insurance companies. Now why would we want to do that?

Why would we . . . the Congressional Budget Office has also said, if the government creates a public plan, the public is going to be on the line, when it runs a deficit, as it surely will, the public, the taxpayer is going to have to pay for it.

Despite several efforts to explain the CBO’s analysis of the effect of the public option on premiums, it is still being misunderstood by the media and misrepresented by scoundrels like Lieberman. The CBO said (h/t Jon Walker)

That estimate of enrollment reflects CBO’s assessment that a public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges. The rates the public plan pays to providers would, on average, probably be comparable to the rates paid by private insurers participating in the exchanges. The public plan would have lower administrative costs than those private plans but would probably engage in less management of utilization by its enrollees and attract a less healthy pool of enrollees. (The effects of that “adverse selection” on the public plan’s premiums would be only partially offset by the “risk adjustment” procedures that would apply to all plans operating in the exchanges.) emphasis added)

Pay attention, Media: The reason CBO claims the Public Option could have "premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges" is because the CBO believes the PO would be covering sicker people with higher costs than those covered by private plans.

It’s an apple and oranges comparison. In other words, private insurers would select and cover healthier people, and thus have lower premiums; the PO would accept and cover all comers, including sicker people, and thus have higher costs and higher premiums.

That is not a criticism of the public option; covering people who are being screwed by the private system is a powerful reason to have the PO. But why does it occur?

The CBO analysis explains (or rather obscures with technical terms) that the private insurers will discriminate against sicker people, even though the new regulations prohibit such discrimination. The embolded sentence means the PO will not attempt "management of utilitzation," which is a euphymism for saying the public option will not behave like the private insurers who will discourage sicker people simply by providing them less responsive coverage.

The private insurers will do everything they can to discourage older, sicker people from choosing them, thus nudging these more costly patients towards the PO. As a result, the PO will tend to have older, sicker patients, with higher health care costs, and so the POs premiums will, on average be higher than the premiums private insurers charge for caring for healthier patients.

In addition, the CBO is conceding that the reform mechanism for discouraging the private insurers from such cherry picking and discrimination in violation of the regulations will not work as effectively as it should. The private insurers will cheat on the exchange rules and undermine the cost-sharing mechanism that would otherwise require private insurers to reimburse the public option for covering higher-cost patients.

Lieberman turns the CBO analysis up-side-down. He claims the PO would cost more and cause government to bail it out. But the opposite is true; what the CBO is telling us is that the PO is actually more efficient than the private insurers. While it’s premiums could be higher if it has to cover higher-cost patients, it would cover those patients with premiums less than the private insurers would charge if they were forced to cover the same patients.

Moreover, CBO is explaining that the PO’s faithful coverage of the higher-cost patients would allow the private insurers to have lower premiums for the lower-cost patients they cover. In other words, even if the PO’s premiums were higher (given the sicker patients it covers), its mere presence allows private insurers’ premiums to be lower, while providing lower cost coverage for the PO’s patients.

In sum:
1. The PO’s presence would provide lower-cost coverage for sicker Americans.
2. The PO would allow private insurers to charge lower premiums to their healthier enrollees, because higher-cost enrolless were covered by the PO.
3. The total cost of coverage for all enrollees in the exchange would be lower because of the PO’s lower costs for faithfully covering the patients with the highest costs.
4. The CBO provides powerful arguments for why a strong Public Option is vital not only to lowering premiums for everyone in the exchange but also for ensuring there is viable coverage for those Americans the private insurers will do everything they can not to cover.
5. If there is no viable PO, and the government were not able to enforce the prohibitions on discrimination that private insurers will seek to evade, then millions more people will be pushed out of the system and/or badly mistreated by the private insurers.
6. If there is no viable PO, and the government succeeded in enforcing the prohibitions on discrimination, then total private premiums would rise (to cover the sicker payments), and so would the need for government subsidies, thus adversely impacting the federal deficits.
7. If Congress wants to lower total premiums and reduce the federal budget for subsidies, while ensuring more of the uninsured are covered, then it should include a strong PO and give more people access to it. A weak PO and limited access makes everything worse.

And Joe Lieberman is an unprincipled, lying scoundrel.

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h/t to ThinkProgess for the video and story.