Academics

• “[A] public plan might be advantaged by dictating to providers lower prices for health care services and products, and it might benefit from hidden subsidies. That unfair advantage could squish the private plans to the wall.”

  Uwe Reinhardt, James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University

Advocates

• “We have to understand that a strong public option is part of the struggle for a national healthcare plan in the future.”

  Joelle Fishman, Chair of the Political Action Commission of the Communist Party USA

• “At some point, the “public plan” might be the only health plan. No more competition. No more consumer choice. Then, there’s only government-run health care. That would be a botched procedure.”

  James R. Edwards Jr., former senior speechwriter for the Republican National Committee

Elected Officials

• “Inevitably, if we create a public option, the public is going to end up paying for it and that’s a cost we can’t take on.”

  Joe Lieberman, United States Senator

• “America’s doctors and hospitals are in a precarious position. They know first-hand that current reimbursement models are broken. And a new government-run insurance plan would only exacerbate the problem.”

  Newt Gingrich, Former House Speaker Gingrich (R-Ga.) is founder of the Center for Health Transformation

• “The bill costs too much, covers too few and will cause 10 million Americans to lose the insurance they currently enjoy.”

  Senator Michael Enzi, ranking member of the House Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

• “More government bureaucrats involved in your healthcare would be destructive. A truly modernized, intelligent health system would focus on measurably improving health outcomes for all Americans. It would be ideologically agnostic about public or private initiatives and instead seek to scale up successful programs and discard those not producing results.”

  Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

• “President Obama supports the idea of a “public option” for health insurance. But the President’s “public option” is a gateway leading to 118 million Americans losing the option of private choice. It is a strategy for government-run health care. It is a Trojan horse.”

  Michael O. Leavitt, former Utah Governor and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services

Health Policy Experts

• “Would a public plan have lower administrative costs? Well, how often are public enterprises run more efficiently than private ones? Why did practically all economically advanced nations dismantle their public airlines, phone companies, and so on, invariably obtaining lower administrative costs and consumer prices?.”

  John E. Calfee, Resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

• “The ‘public option’ proposal was supposed to be better at estimating and containing costs. But it came in over budget… There’s a cheaper way to cover uninsured Americans and making health care more cost effective: Focus reform efforts on improving health, not finding money for the public plan.”

  Robert Goldberg, PhD, President of The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest Advance

• “[The] preferred plan, embraced by Obama, is to throw Medicare open to everyone, and then over time force everyone into it. They say if you have employer-provided insurance, you can keep it. But that choice will be up to the employer, not you. As the government forces costly regulatory burdens, like guaranteed issue and community rating, onto private insurance, employers facing the soaring premiums will just dump their workers into Medicare. These costly regulatory burdens, plus the taxpayer subsidies for Medicare, will eventually drive out all private insurance alternatives.”

  Peter Ferrara, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation and general counsel for the American Civil Rights Union

• “The administration and others say a government-sponsored public plan can and should compete with private plans on a level playing field. The idea sounds attractive, but it is actually a bad idea. And federal lawmakers will find a far better alternative right under their collective nose.”

  Stuart Butler, vice president of domestic and economic policy studies, Heritage Foundation

• “Republicans and Democrats agree that the government’s Medicare scheme for compensating doctors is deeply flawed. Yet Mr. Obama’s [public] plan for a centrally managed government insurance program exacerbates Medicare’s problems by redistributing even more income away from lower-paid primary care providers and misaligning doctors’ financial incentives.”

  Scott Gottlieb, MD, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

• “Once private plans have been driven out of the market, people will realize that the government plan will not be able to sustain the quality and quantity of benefits they were promised. Government instead will begin to ration care and services, driving out innovation, competition and patient-centered quality.”

  Grace Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute

• “Medicare is about as good at controlling health care spending as Fannie Mae was at assessing qualified home-loan applicants.”

  Merrill Mathews, executive director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance and a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation

• “If enacted, the administration’s plan would represent the largest intrusion of government control into this country’s health care since Medicare and Medicaid — perhaps even larger. It is not an exaggeration to say our entire health-care system is at risk with this new plan.”

  Dr. Peter Stark, retired surgeon and health-care policy analyst with Washington Policy Center

• “The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s health-care proposal is the “public option.” Intended to provide government insurance to those who cannot afford private coverage, the “public option” would expand existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Expansion of these beleaguered programs would only add to our mounting deficit.”

  Sally C. Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute

• “With Uncle Sam picking up the tab, proponents predict health-care spending would be reduced, administrative burdens would be eliminated, and doctors would be free to practice as they wish. Do they really believe that adding another major program to the federal government would actually eliminate administrative headaches and make it easier for doctors? We need only to look to our neighbors to the north, in Canada, for a clear view of what we could expect under a single-payer system.”

  Devon Herrick, senior fellow of the National Center for Policy Analysis

Newspaper Editorial Boards

• “….a public plan is going to have the advantages of being part of the massive federal government. That’s the whole point: that unfair competition against private health insurance from a government entity — especially via the lure of artificially low premiums — will run much of the private health industry into the ground, put them out of business.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “As several studies show, if health reform includes a ‘public’ insurance plan to ‘compete’ with private insurance, it will mean the end of private insurance in America - all at once or gradually, depending on the design.”

  Morton Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call & Fox News commentator

• “It is difficult to imagine a truly level playing field that would simultaneously produce benefits from a government-run system. … Such power, if exercised in a public health option, eventually would produce a single-payer system; if that’s where the country wants to go, it should do so explicitly, not by default. If the chief advantage of a public option is to set a benchmark for private competitors, that could be achieved in other ways, for example, by providing for the entry of a public plan in case the private marketplace did not perform as expected.”

  Editorial, Washington Post

• “A public program won’t compete in a way that any normal business would recognize. As an entitlement, Congress’s creation will enjoy potentially unlimited access to the Treasury, without incurring the risks or hedging against losses that private carriers do. As people gravitate to “free” or heavily subsidized care, the inevitably explosive costs will be covered in part with increased outlays to keep premiums artificially low or even offer extra benefits. Lacking such taxpayer cash, private insurance rates will escalate.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “The choice is between giving consumers a real market of competing insurers and steering them steadily toward single-payer.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “Insurers and private companies have been at least as innovative as the federal government in recent years in finding ways to provide quality care at lower costs.”

  Editorial, Washington Post

• “This public option would be the most radical change in the way American health care is financed – and thus provided – in at least 44 years, and maybe ever.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “Medicare keeps costs under control in part because of its 800-pound gorilla capacity to dictate prices – in effect, to force the private sector to subsidize it. Such power, if exercised in a public health option, eventually would produce a single-payer system; if that’s where the country wants to go, it should do so explicitly, not by default.”

  Editorial, Washington Post

• “…[E]mployers small and large will have every incentive to dump their plans and transfer their workers to the public rolls.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “But it would be a huge mistake for the left to torpedo reform over this question.”

  Editorial, Washington Post

• “Once government takes over the majority of U.S. health-care liabilities, it can either provide every service at huge and growing cost, or it can ration services.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “Or you can think of the public plan as a Trojan horse. Once allowed inside the gates of the health insurance market and given an unfair advantage, it will eventually out-compete its private rivals and gain monopoly power.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “But we do know a few things about government-run health plans… We know those plans pay bare-bones rates and yet still are busting the federal budget.”

  Editorial, Chicago Tribune

• “Medical innovation will be at the mercy of the price controls hashed out in Washington.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “As we said at the time, Obama’s plan is a blueprint for socialization in stages. It starts with a basically good idea – setting up a truly national market (which we don’t have now) for private insurance – and stacks the odds against the insurers by putting a tax-subsidized plan in the mix.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “Costs clearly need to be controlled. But the Democrats’ solution to all this government excess is to create . . . another government-run health plan.”

  Editorial, Chicago Tribune

• “[The public plan] proposal would be open to everyone and necessitate a huge permanent increase in government spending as a share of the economy.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “Nowhere will government ‘meddling’ have more negative consequences for ordinary Americans than in this country’s health system — which, despite its very real flaws, is rightly renowned worldwide for excellence.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “Creating another largescale government-run plan would only result in more cost-shifting — higher health-care expenses for the average American.”

  Editorial, Greeneville News

• “…the federal government isn’t competition. It is the health care equivalent of Bigfoot, with so many Americans on its rolls that it dictates prices for doctors, drugs, and other benefits. It sets low prices, to be sure, lower than many insurers are able to match. But that just means those doctors and hospitals recoup the losses by shifting costs onto those with private insurance – amounting to an estimated $89 billion a year…”

  Editorial, Chicago Tribune

• “As many as 119 million of the 172 million Americans who are privately insured would switch from private to public coverage if the public plan were similar to Medicare, according to a recent analysis by The Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm. That would be the end of private insurance as we know it.”

  Editorial, Chicago Tribune

• “Meanwhile, the plan would set up competition between private and public insurance, under market rules written by the government. It would be like a sports event where one of the contending teams also serves as referee.”

  Editorial, Oklahoman

• “Americans benefit most from a health-care marketplace with robust competition among private plans. A government-run plan should not be allowed to diminish that private choice and competition.”

  Editorial, Greeneville News

• “…a public option is the beginning of the end of private health insurance.”

  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

• “President Obama and Congress’ plan to offer a government health plan would ultimately be a death warrant for private health insurance. The public must be alerted.”

  Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily

• “If Congress proceeds with reform, however, federal lawmakers should not seek to force out private-sector insurance coverage that works well for millions of Americans.”

  Editorial, Greeneville News

• “What President Obama is trying to do is to slip in a vastly expensive health care ‘reform’ that will lead inevitably to a government-run, socialized system for everyone – complete with rationing to decide who gets care and who does not, based on such factors as life expectancy and lifestyle choices (whether the patient deserves treatment for conditions resulting from smoking, drinking, riding a motorcycle, etc.) – while dressing up the scheme with lipstick and a wig to prevent anyone from pointing out there’s a pig under there.”

  Editorial, Las Vegas Review-Journal