Single payer proponents are still stung by the loss of their big issue to other big issues — or big players, if you will — but the prospect of a strong public option is the balm that may still salve that wound. This was one of the messages delivered by Giorgio Piccagli, President of the California Public Health Association, North and member of the Executive Board of the American Public Health Association at a panel discussion tonight sponsored jointly by OWL of San Francisco (The Voice of Midlife and Older Women) and the League of Women Voters of San Francisco. Audience members were urged to fight, among other things, for retention of the provision which would allow states to have single payer. (A California single payer bill passed the Senate Health Committee this spring and will be heard by the full Senate in 2010.)
Fellow panelist Debbie LeVeen echoed the call, saying a “robust public plan” must be national, to insure it’s large enough, must have authority to set prices and to bargain on drugs, and use the Medicare provider network.
Backing his call for reform with increasingly heard data such as sobering figures about uninsured Americans (45 million uninsured and another 50 million under-insured, for a total of about 1 in 3 of us) Piccagli said the lessons of the past 40 years include the fact that classical economics of supply and demand do not apply to health care: increasing the number of doctors, or competition among hospitals, only results in rising costs.
If the energies formerly tied to single payer can be channeled into a push for a public option some feel a viable reform bill will emerge. The San Francisco audience, many of whom were fervent proponents of single payer (which was endorsed by both OWL and the League of Women Voters) and most of whom are seasoned activists, left the room armed with cards to send appropriate legislators and plenty of ammunition to support their call now for a public option.
Said the third panelist, Co-Director of the Center for Policy Analysis Ellen Shaffer, about prospects for a robust public plan, “I think it’s up to us.”
