Healthcare: Insurance: Congressional tide seems ebbing from single-payer to consociational nonprofit co-ops

It seems the tide is turning in the Senate, it is ebbing away from the grossly-statist structure of insurance, the House healthcare legislation laying limp, forlorn, unread. Meanwhile, the idea of co-ops has gained in currency where a bipartisan committee of six members of the Committee there is trying to finish up its proposal for member-owned nonprofit healthcare-insurance co-ops.

There remains a narrow window of opportunity for Christian-communal political action to make sure the proposal for faith-based and community-based health insurance initiatives is included under the nonprofit coop idea, to compete with the health forprofits which are often megacorporations. However, there do already exist some faith-based insurers with outstanding portfolios of reserve assets, Thrivent and Lutheran Brotherhood, for instance. In Canada, FaithLife Financial.


White House Appears Open to Insurance Co-ops

by Joseph Berger (August 16, 2009, New York Times)

The Obama administration sent signals on Sunday that it has backed away from its once-firm vision of a government organization to provide for the nation’s 50 million uninsured and is now open to using nonprofit cooperatives instead.

Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said on Sunday morning that an additional government insurer is “not the essential element” of the administration’s plan to overhaul the country’s health care system.

“I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” she said on CNN’s [TV program] “State of the Union.” “That’s really the essential part, is you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”

--Politicarp