I know the primary's over, but I was reading
an article about how Biden's public option plan was actually less ambitious than other 'moderate' alternatives to single-payer like those proposed by Buttigieg and O'Rourke:
The health care debate during the primary became a long dispute between Medicare-for-all supporters (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and non-supporters (the other candidates, more or less).
That obscured the extent to which Biden’s plan was considerably less ambitious than other “moderate” plans from the likes of Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke. Their ideas would have created a new, beefed-up Medicare that competed directly with private insurance for non-elderly customers — likely taking advantage of Medicare’s administrative efficiencies and greater bargaining power to gobble up a huge share of the market.
Biden has proposed something more modest. His plan would add a public option to the Affordable Care Act exchanges, an old progressive proposal from the 2009 debate, which should lower costs for people shopping on the exchanges. But while Biden’s version of the public option will be formally open for anyone to join, in practice, the vast majority of Americans who haven’t reached retirement age would continue to get health care from their employers. There is seemingly no tax-efficient way for a company to shift employees into the exchanges.
Would one of our healthcare policy wonks help me understand what this means? I had been under the impression that Biden's and Buttigieg's healthcare plans were very similar, as neither even allowed employer buy-ins and so work-based insurance would still be the norm for most Americans.
