Over at “Convergences,” I write on the origins of the idea of a “public option” for health insurance. In part, I note:
At a superficial level, the “public option” for health care is both appealing and puzzling. From a competition policy standpoint, the entry into the market of a subsidized competitor offering a wide array of benefits certainly might put downward pressure on prices as well as easing humanitarian concerns about access. Equally obvious, though, are objections. What mechanism of accountability would exist to ensure that this subsidized entity is well run? It cannot be allowed to go bankrupt; nor is it likely that unhappy customers would have much leeway in suing it. How would it avoid driving private insurers out of the market for low-end service entirely? How much of a subsidy would it get, and how is this to be funded?
Since the party and administration that sponsored this proposal are associated with the intelligentsia, however, people hoping to improve the health care system probably felt entitled to trust that these questions had good answers. Somewhere, someone deep in the bowels of the brain trust had considered these issues. Curious about this, I found myself reading one of the more serious works to address the public option, a paper by Randall D. Cebul, James B. Rebitzer, Lowell J. Taylor and Mark E. Votruba entitled, “Unhealthy Insurance Markets: Search Frictions and the Cost and Quality of Health Insurance,” identified as NBER Working Paper No. 14455, from October 2008.
Read my whole piece, here.
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