In a prior post i argued that a new public plan really should be modeled after the TVA. A federal program when started with seed money from the government which was turned into a self funding financially independent entity. This is the only way to insure that our legislative leaders are unable to access the reserves that the system must have if it is to provide a truly viable solution to the problem of short term insurance rates for medical insurance in which the bulk liabilities are not incurred until a person reaches retirement age.

While I doubt that we have the clout to do such a thing in the current political environment, it was done in the past so there is still hope.

I fear that regional co-ops would fail the same way that the Blue Cross Blue Shield “co-ops” of the ’30s morphed into the leaches that they are today, and without a public plan it is almost a certainty that it will bankrupt the country.

Is Medicare or Medicaid wasting money? No.

If you have been following this debate at all, you should know the administrative costs for those programs are tiny compared to private health insurance. What costs us now is the demand for profit and exorbitant salaries for insurance company CEOs.

Nobody puts much stock in the cooperatives. We don’t even know how they would work. That will not and should not be part of the final health care reform bill. Sorry.

Congress has a horrible record of waste and promoting or allowing bureaucratic mismanagement. Sure, we “should” elect representatives and senators who are as tenacious about this as the late Senator William Proxmire, the famous Democrat deficit hawk and anti-pork barrel vigilante.

Odds are, with 535 members of Congress, that election of the sort of assembly of saints needed to be good managers is not going to happen. Certainly there will be a few, and maybe even a significant minority of members who are dedicated to spending money wisely and serving the interests of their constituents.

Any national health care public option must, in my opinion, be done through something like a system of cooperatives, otherwise the billions that will go into the system will be looted, misspent and wasted.

Why? One word that includes 535 separate agendas. Congress.

There is nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress to spend taxes for the alleged funding purpose of the tax. Social Security is a superb example of this. Money collected today from active workers is used to pay current retirees. There is no such thing as a “trust fund,” it’s an illusion. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled at least once that retirees legally have no proprietary or ownership interest in the money they paid in while actively working. It was, and is, a tax, revenues from which Congress can spend on anything it wants.

Newly in charge of trillions of dollars in new revenue, Congress doubtless would go on a spending spree that would embarrass drunken sailors on shore leave. This is based on what Congress has historically done, not on what an assembly of saints would do.

My own thought is that the best solution would be the regional cooperatives that President Obama seems inclined to support, keeping Congress away from the revenues in the first place, and the actual users of the service more or less in control.