Senior Adviser to President: Public Option Can Reduce Costs. Trigger? Not So Much

[laughingliberal]

One of President Obama's senior advisers argued on Monday that a national public plan would have a noticeable impact on lowering the costs of the health care system yet the evidence wasn't yet available to claim that a trigger-proposal would do the same.
Dr. Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that she had "personally been quite persuaded that the public option can be an important source of cost growth containment," during a speech at the Center for American Progress.
Romer cited a case study of counties in California where the introduction of a government-run plan helped bring down overall costs in the private market.
"One of the things I've learned is that if you look at the state of California for example, where people on Medicaid have a lot of the counties what they do is to contract with HMO to provide care to Medicaid patients," said Romer. "And there are a lot of what we call two-plan counties where there are two plans in each counties. And in some counties there are two private plans and in some counties you have one private plan and one publicly run plan. And the interesting thing is that cost growth in the counties with a public and a private is indeed slower than in counties with two privately run plans. It is a small sample... that is one of the things that is giving me a sense that it could be something that could genuinely slow the growth rate of costs."


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/26/christina-romer-public-pl_n_334043.html