As prospects decline for a single-payer Medicare for All program, health reform advocates turned to a government-designed insurance plan that could compete with private insurance plans, according to Markian Hawryluk’s reporting for Kaiser Health News. A public option could increase health care access by making a lower-cost plan available to consumers, but a public option plan has faced political opposition. Washington state is in its second year of offering the nation’s first public option health insurance plan, but state officials have learned that they must require hospitals to do so, he wrote.
