Not very, in all probability.
According to current reports, only those whose coverage exceeds 12.5 percent of their income, only the smallest businesses, or those who aren’t covered by Medicare or VA programs… a very few onlies will have access to the public option. Still, the public option is less important than the reform bill itself. We may have reached the point at which the perfect is indeed the enemy of the good.
Early on in this process my friend Catherine Dodd, whose extensive health policy credentials include stints on Nancy Pelosi’s staff and as a Regional Director for the Department of Health and Human Services, advised an audience inundated with numbers and percentages and data to remember just one figure: “Nineteen point seven,” she said. It has taken an average of 19.7 years after one health reform measure failed to raise the issue again.
Many of us do not have another 19.7 years to wait for the next battle.
