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When the U.S. health care debate began last spring, the insurance industry and its congressional defenders fretted over the prospect that 119 million Americans might defect from private insurance to a public option, thus devastating the business model of wealthy insurance companies.
Since then, however, the industry has won so many concessions that the threat from the surviving public option has shrunk to about five percent of its feared effect. In assessing the House leadership’s health reform bill, the Congressional Budget Office projects that only six million Americans could or would sign up for the bill’s version of the public option.
And, to make the picture even prettier for the insurance industry, many of those six million would be the chronically ill, customers that the private insurers don’t want anyway.
”The Incredible Shrinking Public Option - Robert Parry
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