The Cooperative Option
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota may just have headed off a looming congressional health-care stalemate by proposing a “third way” solution — private cooperatives. Ezra Klein lets Sen. Conrad speak for himself:
The G-11 group, which is the members of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, chairmen and ranking members of the key committees, who’ve been given the overall responsibility to coordinate health care reform in the Senate, asked me 10 days ago to come up with something to bridge the divide […]
The co-op structure came to mind because it seems to fulfill at least some of the desires of both sides. In terms of those who want a public option because they hope to have a competitive delivery model able to take on the private insurance companies, a co-op model has attraction.
And for those against a public option because they fear government control, the co-op structure has some appeal because its not government control. It’s membership control, and membership ownership.
Also the co-op model has proven very effective across many different models. Ocean Spray in the cranberry business, and Land of Lakes in the dairy business, and Puget Sound in the health care business.
Read the whole thing for a lucid brief explanation of how health coops would work and the various options for organizing them so that their pools would be big enough to be viable and competitive.
Where did this idea come from? I’ve done a fair amount of health care reporting, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
I guess it came out of conversations in my office after we were asked to see if we couldn’t come up with some way of bridging this chasm. Part of it is that we’re so used to cooperative structures in my state. They were begun by progressives, they came out of the progressive era. And they’re so successful in our state. So I can’t really say we came up with some brand new idea. We just thought about our own experience.
I hope Maxwell, who ran a cooperative for years, will come in on this post and take it from here.
Ambiance 