Sure, I've been prepared to fly my flaming biplane into the cattle pond or just jump up and down in a raging hissy-fit if the public option doesn't get included. But James Surowiecki, who believes the new insurance regulations are for real, could easily change my mind. He explains:
There is, of course, a great deal of skepticism about whether these regulations will work the way they’re supposed to, and a conviction that the insurers will find some way to game the system. The skepticism is understandable, since gaming the rules is obviously something most insurers are very good at. But it’s hard for me to see how the principles Obama laid out (principles that are embodied in every health-reform plan out there, including Max Baucus’s) can actually be meaningfully gamed, precisely because the requirements seem pretty black-and-white: community rating, out-of-pocket spending limits, requirements for the kinds of treatment that must be covered, and no rescission. Of course, the devil is in the details. But if we get something along these lines, coupled with an insurance exchange, it should make it much harder for insurance companies to compete by engaging in bad behavior, while creating an incentive for them to compete along the lines we want them to compete on: better customer service, better access to providers, and so on. I realize this will be a long way from a single-payer system (which from an economic point of view has always seemed to me the most sensible way to provide insurance). But I think it’s a mistake to underestimate how much it would improve things.
