Co-ops: A Compromise... of Effectiveness

A great report on NPR this morning about healthcare co-ops, the supposed replacement for the public option.

Conrad's bill calls for expanding health care cooperatives into all 50 states. There's hardly anyone, anywhere who has studied whether adding more co-ops would make any difference.

Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, is one of the few people who have researched them. Jost suggests that the expenses involved in starting a co-op and the struggle for market share would kill off most of them before they got going. He says it's unlikely they'd make medical care any cheaper.

"Where I've seen cooperatives in operation, they don't really compete on price," he says. "They compete on quality, on customer satisfaction. That's good. We need more quality. We need insurance products people are really happy with. But what we need most is cost control."

Follow the link and listen to the whole report. And then marvel at the lameness of Kent Conrad and Congressional Democrats.