The most recent fiscal cliff deal ended up cutting $1.4 billion from the Affordable Care Act’s CO-OP program. For those that don’t remember the CO-OP was designed to be a lame replacement for the public option. It was meant to help consumer by creating alternatives to for-profit insurance companies. It provides loans to start health [...]

When health care reform was first passed, elected Democrats told progressives not to worry about how bad the bill actually was because it would serve only as a “starter home” that would be improved on later. Since then, however, several changes have been or will be signed into law by President Obama, all of which [...]

While co-ops were once proposed as a possible alternative to the public option, the idea failed to gain public traction outside of the offices of Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR). Yet, like some sort of legislative vestigial organ, the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) was never removed from the final [...]

Now that this bill will become law the important question is where do we go from here on health care reform? I have said before that I think this bill is deeply flawed and, most importantly, does not provide an clear pathway to eventually getting real reform. But now that this bill is the new [...]

It appears Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has created the unholy grail of terrible gimmicks meant to cripple the public option. It is a several-year-delayed, triggered, state-based, non-public co-op limited to the exchange option: Landrieu calls her proposal the “competitive community option,” which sounds remarkably similar to a trigger proposal advocated by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). A [...]