Commentary: Another Dire Forecast Against Private Option Flops

Crying “Wolf!” Tunes the Public Out Before Real Challenges Arise

Real news broke last week. Insurance rates in the state's "private option" health care plan, on average, will drop. The drop is expected to be slight, but it's there.

This news isn't quite as good as it first appears. Nothing touching Obamacare ever is as good or as bad as it looks. In this case, suppose you're on private option and your rate does drop. The amount of subsidy you get could drop too under some circumstances. So your out-of-pocket expense may rise yet.

Still, this latest news is undeniably good for the plan, the people in it and the idea's supporters. Dire predictions of big rate jumps were flat wrong.

The sky didn't fall -- again. Once again, forecasts of doom waiting around health care reform's next corner fell flat. Someday, something bad may really be around the corner. By then, at this rate, we'll be ignoring every critic of this plan who's left.

Health care reform is an ongoing process that will take decades. Good things about it are front-loaded. Most of the challenges we face are yet to be met. Delays to facing the real music are built into the plan. There is the "risk corridor," for instance. Suffice it to say that your federal government has promised to eat the cost of really big increases in many plans through 2016. So if Arkansas had faced big increases, the effect would have been buffered -- for the newly insured, anyway, if not for the federal deficit.

Look familiar? The federal government gives us something. A few years pass and we become used to having it. Then the real costs demand to be picked up. I can understand why health care reform supporters do that sort of thing, especially since the benefits appear to be outweighing the costs even in the long term. What I can't understand is why opponents keep making dire predictions of drastic, immediate doom. They know full well that safeguards against such consequences are built into federal law.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Alarm bells help win elections. That's why they keep getting rung.

Sticking with what we can already see, it appears private option works better than flat-out expansion of Medicaid. Straight-up Obamacare would have expanded government-run Medicaid to cover the working poor. Arkansas' private option subsidizes private insurance for the same working poor. The effect of this is that a couple of hundred thousand people in Arkansas got insurance. A lot of these newly insured are young and healthy. The rest of us in the private insurance market are better off for having these folks in the same, albeit subsidized, market. They share the risk.

Private option has become a bridge spanning the gap between people eligible for public health programs and those of us who can still afford private insurance. That gap is the biggest problem in the American health care system, by the way. So perhaps private option isn't the road to socialized medicine, but one of the few remaining exits ramps off it.

On a related note, it's always a little irritating to read news about private option in the out-of-state press. They often talk about how the measure "narrowly" passed here. That's true in the bare sense that private option got just enough votes in the Legislature. But the wider picture is that this measure passed with the three-quarters majority that our antiquated state constitution requires.

Support for this thing is solid. That support improves every day that this plan doesn't do its enemies the favor of self-destructing. If a small minority does manage, after the next election, to lodge itself in the throat of this thing, their party had better prepare itself for a drubbing in 2016 no matter how much money its sugar daddies give to it.

Arkansas Republicans were never happy to have to cope with health care reform, but they seem to have made the best of it. To strain an analogy, I oppose shotgun marriages in principle. However, I also don't favor divorce in any marriage that's working well for the people in it, however it got started and however much that surprises the now-happy couple.

DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.

Commentary on 08/31/2014

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