Okay, so I'm really getting furious now.

I just called my senator--Dianne Feinstein--in a nearly fruitless attempt to find out what her stance is on the public option in the health care reform bill.

For any of my fellow Californians reading this, Feinstein has been particularly obtuse on her position here. I've tried scouring her website for information without success (despite the fact that an aide assured me she'd published her position there recently).

On my first call, I was told that the Senator did, in fact, support a public option, inasmuch as she would "vote for a bill that included" it.

But that isn't saying very much, is it? For one thing, that seems to be a safe bet for a Blue Dog who doesn't want to see the government competing with insurance companies, as WaPo and others are reporting the public option may well be dead.

It also suggests strongly that Feinstein is not actively supporting the public option--something I believe (and told her aide) she is obligated to do considering the wishes of her constituency.

On my second call (this time to her Washington office) I asked again what the Senator's position was. This time, after pressing through the wishy-washy response, I was told that Feinstein favors the non-profit "health insurance co-op." THIS, in fact, is the "public option" she supports.  

What's my problem with the notion of these "non-profit health insurance co-ops"? Well, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else I know has any idea what the fuck that even means.

According to Sen. Kent Conrad,  the concept’s chief proponent, a non-profit health-insurance co-op is more or less what the name implies: Theoretically, consumers would get together to form their own health insurance companies, and again, in theory, these co-operative companies would be able to offer affordable health insurance to the public.

One major problem with the idea is that, for the most part, they don’t currently exist, not as Conrad has described them.  While some 300 companies across the U.S. call themselves “health-care cooperatives,”  only two companies currently actually offer health care to the public: Group Health Care Cooperative in Washington, and  Health Partners in Minnesota.  (The rest are organizations “don't actually underwrite and sell health insurance; they simply negotiate rates on preexisting plans with health-insurance companies” according to an article in BusinessWeek.

Essentially, both Group Health Care and Health Partners are HMOs, just like the other HMOs we currently contend with. They’re just non-profit, and considerably smaller (read: less powerful) than the big insurance companies like WellPoint.

But consider this: Kaiser-Permanente--one of the biggest insurers in California, is ostensibly a not-for-profit corporation. Which hasn’t prevented it from becoming the  fifth-largest private company in America, according to Fortune, and for the first quarter of 2007 (the only quarter for which I could quickly find data) one that reported a profit of $1.7 billion dollars.  And as to keeping costs down? I don’t know about you, but I earn pretty good money and I can’t afford Kaiser coverage.

The important thing to consider about these health care co-ops is this: If they’re going to work as advertised, what is required is that we start them ourselves.  Which means we have to find about 50,000 like-minded local people, come up with millions and millions of dollars in start up money, then go out and find doctors and hospitals, nurses and other medical staff to actually provide actual, you know, HEALTH CARE. Should be a snap, no?

I don't know about you, but that seems like a ridiculous implausible solution to me.