I assume you're referring to Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates. The public option is explicitly not modeled after that and is intended to work as a private company.

That said, again, if the public option were to go away completely, which is a possibility, you're still talking about creating a marketplace that currently does not exist.


That's exactly my point. People who are enthusiastic about medicine (or any field) are likely to be the best at it, and many of them are being driven away by the insurance companies.

And a free market in health care currently doesn't exist. No one has anything approaching perfect information. Group health insurance is effectively a series of employer-sponsored monopolies. And it's not a simple commodity anyway, as insurance providers clearly deny their product to those they feel they can't make any money from.


I don't think that anyone thinks that doctors are, on average, exceptionally avaricious. Change that to insurance companies and you might have a case. A case that no one will defend.

And by "money-grubbing Wall Street types", are you referring to the people who took taxpayer money intended to bail out their institutions that they ran into the ground by defrauding each other and the populace and then paid for performance bonuses and parties with it? And then afterwards were told that if they wanted their companies to benefit off of the taxpayer that they were required to have a salary cap?

Why is it that you're all for companies getting taxpayer money and having them being able to squander it however they wish without restriction, but if that taxpayer money instead goes to individuals to try and make sure they don't get sick, you get all up in arms?