March 2012
135 posts
The Democratic Party Health Insurance Collective
I’ve asked this before, but no one has ever answered it. It’s a question for the millions of progressives in this country who support the ACA.
Right now, progressives could all form a giant collective. You could call it the Democratic Party Health Insurance Coop. Everyone would join by contract. Under the contract, the collective would have the power to assess income taxes and penalties on all of its members. Members would vote on collective policies. If the collective wants, it could agree to require individuals to purchase private insurance policies, and the taxes and penalties collected could just be used to subsidize purchases by the poor. Or the collective could create a single-payer system, whereby the collective paid all covered health insurance expenses. Physicians wishing to be eligible to treat members of the collective would have to agree to be bound by various regulations issued by the collective. Anyone who joins would be covered, regardless of any preexisting conditions.
There are more progressives in this country than there are people in numerous other counties with varying degrees of socialized medicine. So why can’t it work here as a giant, voluntary collective? (It might be doomed to fail if Republicans controlled the majority of the wealth in this country, but that’s not the case.)
And why wouldn’t progressives prefer that health care be provided this way? By forming a collective, they wouldn’t have to compromise with conservatives on issues like birth control or abortion.
This seems like it would work. This seems like it should work. So why do progressives insist upon achieving their objection through a coercive, mandatory policy that applies to people with fundamentally different values? I genuinely don’t understand.
