Senate caving to knuckle-dragging mob?

Kudos to you dunkelberg!  These are times I am glad I live in California.  I am for the most part satisfied with my senators.  But learning about the loss of the public option is disheartening because so many Americans, now called the working poor, cannot afford the main stream insurance rates.  Our only hope is that the cooperatives who can receive federal start up money will, indeed, challenge high rates.  This is suppose to be how compeition works, but will it?   

I am ever so grateful that the liberals are so much more smarter than us average folk. I'm sure by now us knuckle-draggers would be still be eating our meat raw, if they hadn't come along and showed us all how to make fire. 'Course we had to give them half of our meat, and get the wood for their fire, but, hot dang, it was worth it!

Now, i'm learning to just be a sheeple, and do as they say! Why they are just the very smartest of people that ever lived!  Honest!!  Just ask them....any of them, they'll tell you!!!!

And if that there Baraka Obama guy wants your muny, why you should ought to hand it over, 'cuz he knows wut he are doin', yessiree.

Yup, them liberals know most ever thang. Furst they invented fire, then they cured poverty, next they invented the internet, then they discovered global warming, and now they is personal-like gunna fix our hemorrhoids!

We can now open the discussion on insurance exchanges.  Exchanges function somewhat like a large employer as purchaser.  They assemble, organize, disseminate information about competing health plans, enact policies that promote risk pooling, design benefit packages, negotiate premiums, limit the number and types of plans marketed, structure the enrollment and plan-selection process.  This is done because consumers are rarely, if ever, equipped to deal with markets offering complex, expensive, hard to understand products.  "Consumers facing complex, high-stakes choices are prone to predictable errors.  They are likely to lack the skill and time to make choices based on a careful assessment of the relative costs and quality of competing health plans, tending instead to choose on the basis of anecdotal information, such as their friends' experience." (NEJM 7-22-09)

How should exchanges be administered.  Exchanges should recognize the realities of behavorial economics.  "Inertia due to numbers" reinforces "status quo bias."  This was discovered in a Swiss health insurance study that revealed when faced with a choice of 30 to 75 health plans that all met mandated coverage standards, there was less competition because people were less likely to change plans thus suppressing competition.  When choices become very large and people are overwhelmed this prevents them from seeking information on alternative plans that are less expensive.  Insurers know this and consider their customers captive customers; therefore, the incentive to competively lower premium costs is mitigated. 

Studies of Medicare recipients suggests when consumers are faced with complex, uncertain choices with consequences they rely on simple rules, many times to their detriment. 

Exchanges need to be structured to encourage consumer choices through consumer-friendly information.  Information and web-based tools to compare plans and their summaries, and to evaluate plans based on individual need and income, but this might not be enough for some to decide. Some federal oversight, counseling and referral would be a practical component for those who need personal help in making a selection.  Also, people should be encouraged to review their plans yearly to evaluate the market and change plans if a better one is available, thus promoting health plan competition.

:) I like it!! I wish more would make their voices be hear other then the paranoid crowd that has no clue what they are actually bitching against.

I have to agree with Karen here.

I guess it depends on WHOSE knuckles are dragging.  The Obama group did an terrible job clearing up the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  I guess they thought all us right wing weirdos, didn't see what was going on up on the HILL.  A comprise will be reach, not totally acceptable to either side.  BUT, Mr. Charm school President has learned a little about the RED states and the populace.  We are are not all the screaming nuts you see at the town halls, but we do VOTE.