Apologies in advance for the novel, but this subject is extremely complicated and riddled with misconceptions
Price control obviously won't do it all, but it is a start, and it takes a small hatchet to bill-padding fraud and abuse. (During my bookkeeping years, I did a stint in the medicare billing dept. of a large nursing home, and you wouldn't believe how complicated the process is, and how it almost invites abuse. Same with any insurance company billing.) Hanging a simplified standard price tag on common goods and procedures is far from being a useless tool. I agree there are a lot of other things that need to be done to control costs, though.
AFA addressing high costs and poor performance, there are a lot of things the PO can do, even without strict price controls. The public option, while not a silver bullet by any means (that would be creating a single payer system like every other advanced nation in the world) has two main advantages out of the starting gate:
1) In an exchange where the public option competes with private insurance options, it can be offered at a lower price, that is, at a price that breaks even rather than makes a consistently rising profit for shareholders. This helps regulate low-end to mid level private policy prices and premium increases while still allowing for private companies to offer high end policies to those who can pay for them.
2) Having a mandate with the choice of a public option + a medicaid expansion absorbs a large number of people into traditional medical care who now only get treatment at the emergency room. This reduces the passing on to the whole insurance pool of the costs of catastrophic care in the ER.
(This also includes millions of people who now never see a doctor getting routine preventive care, though no one can provide figures that show prevention actually makes healthcare cheaper, for some reason. Probably because the cost of tests and procedures in the short term is higher than an unknown number of dollars saved over no cancer or diabetes in the long term.)
AFA poor performance, that's what Obama was trying to address with his proposal to take the best ideas from the most efficient HC providers in the country, examine how/why they work and standardize them across the industry. There's a commission created in this bill to start doing that, though again, I don't have a lot of faith in commissions. There's also a commission to pinpoint and rule on medicare fraud and abuse and a provision to create and maintain an electronic patient database, and some emphasis on the aforementioned preventive care.
You guys have put me in the position of defending a deeply flawed bill that I have many doubts about, but I'm doing it because the alternative to this bill will be that absolutely NOTHING is done to fix health care. It will be a toxic political football for generations, and that ultimately along with the disintegrating educational system and the shrinking middle class, means the failure of the whole country.
So, what choice is there? Once repubs retake the congress and WH, which they will by 2016 at the latest barring the Second Coming, I don't think anyone exactly expects them to institute Medicare for All, despite their current attempt to portray themselves as the custodian of the program. They're much more likely to try again to dismantle and privatize it, and to ignore the need to regulate the insurance industry, as market regulation in any form, however rudimentary, is again not something that's exactly a plank of their platform. So if anything is going to be done there really is a very small window to do it.
