Rockefeller has his own proposal for universal health coverage, “The Consumer Choice Health Plan.”
It is one of several competing proposals to overhaul the nation’s health care system being worked on in the U.S. Senate.
Rockefeller says he’s putting up a public plan to compete with the private health insurance market.
He emphasized that consumers would get to keep their insurance if they want.
“If you like the insurance you have, you go ahead and keep it. There’s no mandate on it. It’s an option,” he said.
He said the health insurance lobby is spending $1.4 million a day fighting the sort of changes he wants.
“They hate it. Because right now, they are ripping off approximately 100 million Americans, and purging their rolls of people that have difficult health problems," he said.
He said insurance companies have purged more than 9 million people from their rolls in recent years.
He said when an insurer does not have to make a profit, it puts all its attention into quality, outcomes, and research. He compared it to Medicare.
“I promise you, when this thing gets understood, people are going to love it,” he said.
His bill would provide a mechanism where Congress could subsidize the set-up of a public health insurance plan – but the plan would have to repay taxpayers within three years.
The only way for Congress to subsidize the program in the future would be through a three-fifths supermajority.
Rockefeller said he would fight to include a public plan in any legislation. He was skeptical about an alternative being floated by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., that would set up regional health insurance co-operatives instead of a public plan.
“I can’t support a cooperative plan. Co-ops emanate mostly from people in the Midwest. We don’t have co-ops in Appalachia. We don’t operate that way.
“That’s an agricultural (model), or maybe a telephone company has a co-op. It’s not done in health care,” he said.
He said money to pay for the plan can be found through health care savings and what he called “pro-health-care” tax increases – such as the increase in cigarette taxes which helped pay for an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Rockefeller was one of the architects of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Rockefeller said Congress failed in the 1990s to enact comprehensive health care reform, in part because Congress and the American people were excluded from designing the plan.
He said if a comprehensive health care bill fails this time, it might be “another 30 years” before Congress tackles it again.
“There’s 250,000 West Virginians who don’t have health insurance, and tens of thousands more who are underinsured. That’s morally wrong,” he said.