By DFA Staff

House GOP leader John Boehner is knocking the public option, saying that any government component to healthcare is akin to “throwing the baby out with the bath water” because it will crowd out private health insurance.

If by “crowd out” Boehner means “pressured to compete”, then his logic makes sense. But it seems that Boehner needs to be reminded that capitalism thrives on competition. A public option would bring new competition into the market driving lower prices and incentives for better service and care, and that’s good for everyone.

Jonathan Singer at myDD makes a good point:

Seventy years ago, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Social Security program to ensure that every senior citizen in the United States had a baseline of insurance coverage, the private insurance industry didn’t go out of business. That is to say, even though every American bought in to the government system, the private insurers weren’t squeezed out.

Why, then, today would an option for the American people to buy into a government healthcare program destroy the private healthcare insurance industry? If a universal government old-age insurance program didn’t drive out of business the private old-age insurers, why would a non-universal government health insurance option drive out of business private healthcare insurers? Unless Republicans are conceding that the private healthcare insurance industry is even more monumentally inefficient than many already think it to be, their logic simply doesn’t work. Or am I missing something?

No, Jonathan, you’re not missing anything. But Boehner is.