Russell Wheeler
EDMOND — Another view of the public option
To the Editor:
This is in reply to Sen. Tom Coburn’s piece (“Health care reform bills will hurt Oklahoma’s seniors, families,” Nov. 5, 2009, The Edmond Sun). Although the senator makes a number of factually incorrect or misleading statements, one in particular requires special attention.
Coburn cites a study by the Lewin Group as concluding that “if the public option language in the bill passed by the House of Representatives becomes law as many as 40 percent of Americans could lose their private insurance and be forced into a government-run plan.” There are several problems with this argument.
First, as of the date of the article, no bill had yet passed the House of Representatives so it is impossible to determine what specific version of the public option he is referring to. Second, Coburn fails to mention that the Lewin Group is hardly a disinterested party to the health-care debate. The Lewin Group is owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest private insurers in the United States. Third, if Coburn is referring to the Lewin Group’s April 2009 study that examined the most robust public option proposals, he severely misstates the findings of the study.
The April 2009 Lewin Group study did not conclude that large numbers of Americans would lose their private insurance or be “forced” from their existing coverage into a government-run plan. Rather, the study concluded that premiums for public option insurance would be so much less than premiums for private insurance that millions of people would voluntarily switch to the public plan. Specifically, the Lewin Group estimated that under a public option plan a typical family’s monthly premium would be $761 versus $970 for private coverage. The real issue here is not that people would be “forced” out of their existing private coverage into a public plan as Coburn asserts, but that they would run to it.
I invite the readers of The Edmond Sun to check out the Lewin Group study for themselves and draw their own conclusions. It’s available online at http://tinyurl.com/crdffv.
Russell Wheeler
Edmond
