Co-Ops are Not the Answer

Not the best news I've seen all day. Some Democrats are trying to prep health care reform supporters for dumping the public option.

Politico:

After the toughest week yet for health reform, leading Democrats are warning that the party likely will have to accept major compromises to get a bill passed this year -- perhaps even dropping a proposal to create a government-run plan that is almost an article of faith among some liberals.

With August dominated by angry faces and raised voices at town hall meetings, influential Democrats began laying the groundwork for the fall, particularly with the party's liberal base, saying they may need to accept a less-than-perfect bill to achieve health reform this year.

"Trying to hold the president's feet to the fire is fine, but first we have to win the big argument," former President Bill Clinton said Thursday at the Netroots Nation convention, a gathering of liberal activists and bloggers who will prove most difficult to convince. "I am pleading with you. It is OK with me if you want to keep everybody honest... But try to keep this thing in the lane of getting something done. We need to pass a bill and move this thing forward."

“I want us to be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf,” he said after recounting the political troubles that followed his failed reform effort in 1994.

"It won’t be an easy sell," reads the report. "Even former national party chairman Howard Dean this week threatened Democrats who don’t support the public insurance plan with the prospect of primary challenges –- the first rumblings of what could devolve into a Democratic civil war over health care."

Apparently, "White House health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle said recently the president was willing to study replacing the government-run plan with non-profit insurance cooperatives –- a compromise under consideration in the Senate Finance Committee."

Here's the thing; co-ops don't do squat. Here in Wisconsin, we have Group Health Cooperative, a non-profit HMO founded in 1976. Did it bring down health care costs?

In 2003, the University of Wisconsin put together a Health Care Workgroup who reported that the health care system was "in crisis."

"It is time we realized that rising health care costs are no longer just an impediment to economic development -- they represent a very real crisis," the workgroup wrote [PDF]. "Through an examination of health care expenditures, the alarming increases in cost nationally and in Wisconsin and the fragmentation of the current system, we hope that the urgency of the health care crisis will become quite evident."

Let me point out that this was six years ago and 27 years after GHC was founded. During those 27 years, the for-profit insurers didn't become more like the co-op, the co-op became more like the for-profits. Today, I'd be willing to bet that many GHC policy-holders have no idea they're dealing with a non-profit. Basically, this is like proposing to "reform" banking by opening up new credit unions.

The reason that the public option is an "article of faith" among supporters of health care reform is because we're supporters of health care reform -- not supporters of pretend health care reform. We can look at health co-ops, we can look at history, and we can prove they don't make any damned difference at all. Hell, this isn't even a band-aid solution. It's more like shaking a medicine rattle over the health care crisis and appealing to the magic of the free market. At least a band-aid would do something.

Cooperatives aren't a compromise reform, they're an abandonment of reform. They're a fig leaf to allow congress to pretend they reformed our health care system, when they know damned well they didn't do anything at all.