Barney Frank: Public Plan Best Route to Single Payer Healthcare

From Wallace Forman on Friday, July 31, 2009 3:34 PM

On Monday, Barney Frank explained what most Americans already understand: the public plan will lead to single-payer, socialized medicine. In response to questions about the current House health care proposals, Frank said, “I think if we get a good public option, it could lead to single-payer, and that’s the best way to reach single payer.”

Frank is right. A public plan would “demonstrate its power” and drown private competitors with rates subsidized by the taxpayers. The Lewin Group estimates that a subsidized public option could quickly drive over 119 million people out of the private insurance market. As the WSJ explains, it has never been a secret that the public plan connects naturally into a single-payer health care system:

Jacob Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, came up with the intellectual architecture for the public option when he was a graduate student in the 1990s. "Someone once said to me, 'This is a Trojan horse for single payer,' and I said, 'Well, it's not a Trojan horse, right? It's just right there,'" Mr. Hacker explained in a speech last year. "I'm telling you, we're going to get there, over time, slowly."

Americans don’t want a one size fits all plan. They want more choice, free markets, and competition.

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