Wednesday, July 14, 2010

San Fransisco's "Public Option"

Ezra Klein from The Washington Post had posted an interesting article pointing to a paper by Carrie Hoverman Colla, William H. Dow and Arindrajit Dube for the National Bureau of Economic Research that discussed the 2006 health care reforms that had taken place in San Fransisco.
In 2006 San Francisco adopted major health reform, becoming the first city to implement a pay-or-play employer health spending mandate. It also created Healthy San Francisco, a “public option” to promote affordable universal access to care. Using the 2008 Bay Area Employer Health Benefits Survey, we find that most employers (75%) had to increase health spending to comply with the law, yet most (64%) are supportive of the law. There is substantial employer demand for the public option, with 21% of firms using Healthy San Francisco for at least some employees, yet there is little evidence of firms dropping existing insurance offerings in the first year after implementation.
I thought this excerpt that Klein posted was interesting, because wasn't there some right-wing fear mongering that a national public option was going to hurt the insurance industry?  Wasn't there some right-wing fear mongering about how businesses did not want a "public option?"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please share your thoughts and experiences in relation to this post. Remember to be respectful in your posting. Comments that that are deemed inappropriate will be deleted.