Via Wonk Room, The Hill reports that Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich thinks Republican challenges to the health-care reform law could actually result in a more progressive, single-payer system. That could also be the result of any successful challenges to the individual mandate, of course. It might turn out that the government can force insurance companies to stop denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and stop cherry-picking the healthiest clients, but can't force individuals to participate while healthy to prevent adverse selection. But what we already know the government can do is collect taxes to fund a public insurance system, and that might be what we're left with. Kucinish also said this about insurance companies on Fox News Friday:
The bottom line is: they're going to make whatever pleas they can to try to cut the limitations that are coming in place in this new bill . . . But the fact of the matter is, beyond all of this is that we really have to move someday towards a not-for-profit system where the insurance companies aren't dictating the kind of health care we're going to have in America.
This was always the rejoinder I hoped for, but rarely got, when Republicans started decrying health care as a "death panel" system that put the big, bad government between patients and their doctors. Who's standing there now? For the moment, of course, it's behemoth companies that are promised a flood of new customers come 2014. Either Kucinich is right, and we're on the road to something better, or he's right and it cools off some of the Republican promises to challenge the law.
-- Monica Potts
