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What exactly is a health care co-op?
President Barack Obama speaks to a crowd at the annual AFL-CIO Labor Day in Cincinnati, Ohio, about his administration's proposed plans for health care reform.
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: President Obama heads to Capitol Hill tomorrow night looking to bring some elusive consensus to the health-care debate. The health-care news of this Tuesday, however, comes from the Senate Finance Committee. It's mulling the idea of something called regional insurance co-operatives. Yes, that's a mouthful. But it's also a phrase you may hear a lot this fall, as Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE: So what exactly is a regional insurance co-op? That can be hard to say, even for North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad, who's been pushing the idea all summer on cable TV.
SENATOR KENT Conrad: A cooperative is membership-owned and membership-run, so it's a non-profit alternative to for-profit insurance companies.
In other words, it's a non-profit company that would sell health insurance to some of the 47 million Americans who don't have any. If you've ever bought a policy through a mutual life insurance company, it's the same idea. But it would only be insurance.
It's not the same thing as a health co-op, where doctors work on salary. Paul Hazen is CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association. In theory, he says insurance co-ops run by their members could offer cheaper coverage than for-profit companies.
PAUL Hazen: They're not-for-profit businesses. They don't have outside stockholders to reward, and they provide a competitive yardstick in the marketplace.
You could say the same thing about the so-called public option. And like that plan, which many conservatives oppose, co-ops, too, would rely on public dollars, at least at first. The idea has its critics, including Paul Ginsburg at the Center for Studying Health System Change. He thinks co-ops might be too small to offer much of a discount.
PAUL Ginsburg: I'm not convinced that they would run their businesses that much differently. Because if they did, they'd be losing money.
Still, if co-ops can help an overhaul bill squeeze through Congress, Ginsburg says that in itself could be a big step forward.
I'm Joel Rose for Marketplace.
If co-ops are OK, why not single payer (which I'm in favor of, by the way).
Single-payer in a democratic country is just a member-owned and run co-op that covers everybody. Details: http://unqualifiedevilgenius.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-fix-health-insu...
Not necessarily. If insurance has to take everyone with rate set on broad parameters. There are three levers to control costs: specialists fees and doctor overhead; insurance profits and overhead; Rx. The coop hopefully addresses the first two.
The whole point of the public option is to have the largest pool of insured participants so we can afford to insure the uninsured.
This regional co-op breaks that idea. It's pointless unless it's a national co-op run like USPS. A quasi-government entity.
If we get a regional co-op, the insurance companies will eat it for lunch. They will make the co-ops take all the unprofitable to insured people.
