Over at Think Progress, Matt Yglesias takes me to task for saying that the so-called public option in the House’s health care bill “would all but eliminate private insurance and force millions of Americans into a government-run system.”

Yglesias apparently still buys into the myth that the public option is, well, an option.

For people who receive health insurance through their employers, which is to say the vast majority of the Americans who currently have health insurance, the House bill would change very little. Or, rather, the biggest change would simply be the confidence that if, in the future, you cease to get health insurance from your employer (maybe you’ll lose your job or want to change jobs) that you’ll still be able to get health care. What’s more, of the minority of Americans who would be getting health care through the new “exchange,” the majority will probably sign up for private health insurance and everyone will have the option of doing so. If the government-run public plan is, for whatever reason, vastly more appealing than the private options then it will dominate. But if you believe the government can’t run health care well, there’s no reason to think that will happen. Whatever you think of that, though, the basic fact is that even if the public option does dominate the exchange most people will still have private employer-provided insurance.

That might be true if the new government-run program were going to compete on anything close to a level playing field.  But, because the public option is ultimately supported by the taxpayers, the playing field can never be level.   True, the bill does say that the new program is supposed to be self-sustaining, covering administrative and benefit costs entirely out of premium revenues.  But remember that Medicare Part B was originally supposed to support 50 percent of its costs through premiums.  That has shrunk to the point where premiums pay for less than 25 percent of the program’s cost.

And the government has a myriad of ways to prevent the true cost of the program from showing up in premium prices.  For example, the government-run plan will not have to pay state or federal taxes, and unlike private insurance plans, who can be sued in state courts, the government-run plan could only be sued in federal court.

At the very least, the program carries with it an implicit guarantee against future losses.  Suppose the public option prices its products too low and loses money.  Can you imagine that Congress is simply going to let it go bankrupt, go out of business?  Would a Congress that has bailed out banks and automobile companies because they are “too big to fail” resist subsidizing the government’s insurance plan if it began to lose money?   Even without the actual bailout, such an implicit guarantee has a value. For example, the implicit guarantees behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were estimated to have saved those institutions $6 billion per year.

All of this means that the government-run plan would be significantly cheaper than private insurance, not because it would out-compete private insurance or because it was more efficient, but because it had unfair advantages.  The lower cost means that businesses, in particular, would have every incentive to dump workers from their current health insurance plan into the government plan.  And, if other provisions of the bill make insurance more expensive, as is likely, the incentive for employers to shift workers to the government plan would be even greater.   Estimates suggest that nearly 90 million workers could eventually be forced into the government plan.

As Robert Samuelson, dean of economic columnists, writes in the Washington Post, “a favored public plan would probably doom today’s private insurance.”

Samuelson is right.  There is nothing “optional” about a public option.  And that is just the way the Left wants it.

This past week witnessed continued debate in congressional committees over changes to our financial regulatory system.  Perhaps catching the most attention was Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s appearance before House Financial Services. 

Sadly missing from all the noise this week was any discussion over reforming those entities at the center of the housing bubble and mortgage meltdown:  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

While many, including Bernanke, have identified the “global savings glut” as a prime force behind the historically low interest rates that drove the housing bubble, often missed in this analysis is the critical role played by Fannie and Freddie as channels of that savings glut.  After all, the Chinese Central Bank was not plowing its reserves into Countrywide stock; it was putting hundreds of billions of its dollar reserves into Fannie and Freddie debt.  Fannie and Freddie were the vehicle that carried excess world savings into the United States.

Had this massive flow of global capital been invested in productive activities, or even just prime mortgages, it is unlikely tha we would have seen such a large housing bubble.  Instead, what did Fannie and Freddie do with its Chinese funds?  It invested those funds in the subprime mortgage market.  At the height of the bubble, Fannie and Freddie purchased over 40 percent of private-label subprime mortgage-backed securities.  Fannie and Freddie also used those funds to lower the underwriting standards of the “prime” whole mortgages it purchased, turning much of the Alt-A and subprime market into what looked to the world like prime mortgages.

Given the massive leverage (at one point Freddie was leveraged 200 to 1) and shoddy credit quality of mortgages on their books, why were the Chinese and other investors so willing to trust their money to Fannie and Freddie?  Because they were continually told by U.S. officials that their losses would be covered.  At the end of the day, Fannie and Freddie were not bailed out in order to save our housing market; they were bailed out in order to protect the Chinese Central Bank from taking any losses on its Fannie/Freddie investments.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that the Chinese accumulated these large dollar holdings in order to suppress the value of their currency, enabling Chinese products to be more competitive with American-made products.

While foreign investors have been willing to put considerable money into Wall Street, without the implied guarantees of Fannie and Freddie, trillions of dollars of global capital flows would not have been funneled into the U.S. subprime mortgage market.  As Washington seems intent on continuing to mortgage America’s future to the Chinese, that at minimum it seems that fixing Fannie and Freddie might help insure that something more productive is done with that borrowing.