"....Most of the health care reform bills circulating in Congress contain some form of this concept. The exchange, in fact, is now the centerpiece of proposed plans drafted mainly by Democrats. It’s a curious development, because the concept was largely popularized by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank best known in recent years for advocating Social Security privatization during the Bush administration. Its track record ought to make Americans more wary of Obama's proposals than any talk of "socialized medicine."
Heritage is the source of a number of radical free-market and socially conservative policy plans that have occasionally worked their way into law, with questionable results. Among the most prominent: welfare reform, which it advocated in the mid-1990s as a means of reducing out-of-wedlock births and restoring “personal responsibility.”
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Like many of the foundation’s ideas, a health insurance exchange looks better on paper than in practice. When Massachusetts launched its health reform experiment in 2006, it relied heavily on Heritage's policy prescriptions. Under then-Governor Mitt Romney, Massachusetts created a voluntary insurance exchange similar to the one Obama often promotes. Massachusetts outlines some basic requirements for plans that participate but it doesn’t set rates or reimbursement levels. And far from revolutionizing health care, the exchange—known in Massachusetts as the Connector—is demonstrating the limitations of relying solely on the market to solve the nation’s health care woes and rein in skyrocketing medical costs.
Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, has done a stellar job of reporting on the Massachusetts initiative. She recently found that the Connector had all but failed to create more affordable insurance options for people in Massachusetts as promised. Using a hypothetical family from Pittsfield in western Mass, Lieberman went shopping on the Connector website. She found that coverage for a 44-year-old couple with an income of $66,150, slightly over the eligibility limit for a state insurance subsidy, “All but three of the fourteen Connector policies cost at least $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year—eighteen percent of their income.” The cheapest policy, at $820 a month, was no bargain. Yet according to the state’s own guidelines, a Pittsfield family with kids could only afford $364 in monthly premiums.
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In the reform bills currently pending in Congress, Democrats have modified the Connector model by introducing a public plan that would compete in the exchange to help keep costs down. But the public option seems increasingly doomed, in no small part to the Heritage Foundation itself, which is apparently horrified by Obama’s embrace of its pet policy..."
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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/08/obamas-insurance-plan-comes-right-wing-think-tank>
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