Booktv continues now on cspan2, television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] good evening and welcome to politics and prose. Finance jack bennett. Welcome. Before we begin, just a few notes. First we ask you to silence your cell phones. You dont want to be the person whose phone rings in the middle of the talk but we do want you to be heard in recording. Lastly after the talk please help us including the space by folding up your chairs and link them against the nearest wall. The signing will begin just afterward with a line stretching towards the front of the store books are available for purchase. Todays guest is professor Ganesh Sitaraman who teaches law at vanderbilt law school. Professor sitaraman worked as an advisor to Elizabeth Warren for the 21st century run and served as a genetic counselor in the senate. Additionally, he is a senior fellow at the center for american progress. Professor sitaraman is a to talk less news book, the public option how to expand freedom, increase opportunity, and promote equality which advocates the implementation of statesponsored altar to the market not only in medicine but in retirement, childcare, college and even baking. I for one cant wait to open my count the public option expense on already existing public options pools come alive risk of medicare, more accessible marketplace. It this is been called quote key reading. Please help me welcome professor sitaraman to politics and prose. [applause] thanks so much, jack, really appreciate that and thanks for going for coming. Its great to be back at politics and prose. Always have a great time when im here. As jack said my new book is called the public option and i suspect a lot of you probably came your thinking you going to hear talk about healthcare policy because of the title, and im sorry to disappoint because the book is not about healthcare here its about a lot more than healthcare. But just to make sure you get your moneys worth, im going o start with healthcare. If we take a step back and think back to 2010, it was a long time ago 2010, there was a big debate going on about expanding Health Insurance in america, and the bill the Affordable Care act was going through congress and the were a lot of people who want a public auction to be part of that bill. The idea of the public option was people would be able to buy into a government Health Insurance program like medicare and that this Public Program would coexist and compete with private Health Insurance plans. This proposal was contentious at the time. The chairman of the rnc sent to a socialistic Joe Lieberman pushed to get it out of the final bill and ultimately it didnt make it into the Affordable Care act. Today were back in another debate about healthcare but its shifted. We talking about the public option and medicare for all, whats often called singlepayer health care system. What i think is exciting and interesting about this whole episode is that the public option isnt actually of recent innovation and policy. Its not limited to healthcare and historically it hasnt even been particularly controversial. We actually have public options all around us and weve had them for hundreds of years. We just dont think of them that way. So a public Swimming Pool is a public option. People have private Swimming Pools. A Public Library is a public option. Georgetown down the road has a private library. There are public parks and private parks. There are Public Schools and some people send their kids to private schools. There are public golf courses President Trump as private golf courses. The list goes on and on. These are public options. Theres universal access and reasonable price and they coexist with the private marketplace. In fact, a lot of notable people in American History have supported public options and many longstanding american traditions and institutions are public options. So the post office, a public option that competes with fedex and ups, is in the text of the constitution and was created in 1792. Ben franklin was instrumental in getting the library tradition started in america. Public Swimming Pools of Public Schools have been with us since the 19th century. And another fun fact, the constitutional right to have an attorney from the famous Supreme Court case gideon versus wainwright is a public option. You can have a public defender or you can opt out and hire a public lawyer. The reason we have so many of these public options in so many places is throughout our history americans have turned to public options as a way to promote equal opportunity and at the same time reconcile markets with democracy. Theres a few reasons why public options are really powerful of doing this. The first is the expand freedom and opportunity. For example, Public Libraries allow anyone to read, check out books or surf the internet in this expands Educational Opportunities and guarantees accessed information everyone. It doesnt prevent anyone from buying books in a bookstore like this one and having their own private library at home. Second reason, public options are good for competitive markets and they make capitalism work better. Public options like schools guarantee we have an educated workforce. Public Services Like subways and the post Office Provide basic infrastructure to support Economic Activity across the country. Public option for healthcare or for retirement can put less pressure on businesses to have to offer the same services themselves, and help Small Businesses they cant afford to offer to the workers and he can help workers want to strike out on their own and become an entrepreneur. Public option competes in the marketplace with other private options and it can be a check on monopoly power. Franklin roosevelts called this yardstick competition. And finally public options are good for our democracy. Whether its a pickup game of basketball or a shared picking table at a a state park in pubc options stitched together the country by bringing together people from different walks of life. They help make our democracy more vibrant and give us a shared set of experiences and goals to debate about in the public sphere. There were a lot more salient than complicated policies like tax credits. You know when youre getting a public option and that builds support for them. It makes them part of our communities and part of our lives. If you think about taking away a local playground or neighborhood park, people dont like that because they see the public option as something thats really valuable to them. Of course in our history the public option just like the history of the country contains shameful episodes of exclusion. To take one example during the jim crow era public Swimming Pools in a lot of places were totally offlimits to black americans. But as a Civil Rights Movement made strides in open public accommodations to everyone, public options including pools became more inclusive as well. In the book we argue the public option can be useful today because its the way to navigate between our urgent need for more equality and the benefits of markets. Ill give you a few examples. Take Broadband Internet. 6. 5 of americans, that includes 25 of people in rural america, dont have any access to moderately speed internet. Select 25 mb download speed which is not that fast if you think about it. If you go to 100 megabytes megabyte download speeds, half of neighborhoods in america have one option and another 36 have options at all. A public option for broadband would go a a long way in addressing the challenge of access while introducing competition into some of these concentrated markets. And this isnt a pieinthesky did. Chattanooga, tennessee, a city of 180,000, has had one gigabyte download internet, extremely fast. As a public option since 2010. And today more than 100,000 other people and businesses in chattanooga take advantage of the public option. Or think about childcare. In a lot of places in the country the cost of childcare is higher than the cost of Public College tuition. That is just too much for many families to bear. A public option would transform how we think about this and would expand access and help working families and the kids. Without constraining those who want to hire a nanny, at grandma move in with import syndicates to a private day care. It also would be good for businesses of problems with persistent childcare issues and its great for the families who are feeling financially squeezed. Squeezed. There are other places that we can imagine public options Going Forward. There are proposals for a public option for basic bank accounts. Sometimes run through the post office, others have proposed running into the Federal Reserve and the idea is you have a basic bank account, millions would be connected to the Financial System who are currently not come and go to include Services Like direct deposit so people would not have to pay the fees that come with going to a check cashier. We also have a debate right now about having free college. This is a this is a true publicn higher education, a universal access to some sort of Post High School education with the training or college and making a free for everyone is another type of public option. I suspect some of you are wondering if these things are so great, if public options are so good and theres so much interest now, why dont we already have public options for all of these other areas . I think the answer gets to history and gets to something about the moment we are in right now. Since world war ii we have lived in two eras interim to think that Public Policy in this area. From the 40s to the 70s, we lived in one era and think of this as an era defined by the treaty of detroit. Let me tell you about but that is. After world war ii the big Car Companies and big labor unions came together and came to a deal. The companies would offer workers higher wages and provide health care and other benefits, in return for labor peace. No strikes, that kind of thing. That deal was called the treaty of detroit, and it captured the idea we would have an employerbased benefits system. This system didnt work for everyone but did work for a lot of people and what it was whether unionized or in many cases even nonunionized, there would be a male breadwinner who would get paid a union wage and would get benefits from the company for him and his family. Basic idea of justice and fairness in this time was, if you work hard for a company, your family will be taken care of and you will have benefits. We then moved into a second era which was a neoliberal area which started in the early 80s and ran through to the present. The idea is people should be on their own to buy goods and services in the marketplace and if there are some people who cant afford it, but we should do is provide a subsidy, Something Like a voucher or tax credit, a way to help people be able to afford that. There were a lot of pushes to privatize Public Services and to offer these kinds of subsidies as opposed to creating direct public provision, public options. I think this approach to Public Policy hasnt worked as well as many people thought. We are in an of extreme economic inequality. We know that markets do not get the axis of social good that people think are important at an affordable price. A lot of cases vouchers and tax credits to work very well. They are hard to use, complicated and can even mean higher prices sometimes. The public option offers a different kind of theory. The idea that i do in our society should have a certain baseline of opportunities that are not tied to their employer or the market, and the reason we think its so powerful right now is we are in a moment where the neoliberal era is been called into question and theres a a l hunger for new ideas and different ways of thinking. Now, the argument in the book is not that we should have public option or that one is necessary for literally everything. There are things that are not essential for anyone to have as a moral matter or as a democratic matter. And if the market works pretty well and is pretty competitive in those areas can in the market is probably fine without a public option. But a lot of time thats not what is going on. I also dont want to be all roses and sentient about public options themselves. Public options can be designed poorly. They can fail for a lack of resources and this is similar to any other public or private service. Public defenders in the courts routinely underfunded. Not all Public Schools provide the education we might want for our kids. And not all public options have been designed to address Structural Racism and disparities across geography. But ultimately this is what democracy should be about the we should be debating and discussing our shared future whatever society we want to live in, and i think thats important and thats what public options help us do. So for the real policy nerds out there and know we are in d. C. So there are probably a lot of you in the room, ill mention a few of the areas that i think are worth thinking but as with the orbit using public options in other sectors. The first is what kind of option should we compete. In the book we distinguish between two, between competitive public options and baseline public options. The competitive public option is like mailing package. You cant mail the same package at the same time with both the post office and ups. These services are competing against each other. Its a competitive public option. The second is a baseline public option, and Social Security is an example. Social security guarantees effectively a pension and retirement but it coexists with private pensions, personal savings, 401 k s, lots of other kinds of things and, in fact, you dont even have to take her Social Security benefits. Some people dont. The place with this debate comes up most legally is in think about healthcare between a public option and singlepayer. Depending on the design if you think about it this way, singlepayer reforms could be a baseline public option, a variant of Health Insurance that i dont get whether maybe supplemental insurance on top of that its possible. In some countries thats how it works. The second question we need to think about is a federalism question. At what level of government should we have a public option . Subways are local transportation public options. State parks as the name suggests operate at the state level. The post office is federal. So when question is what level government is best for providing the particular good or service were thinking about, and it would depend but whats important is we currently have public options at all three levels, local, state, and federal. A third question is funding. How do we pay for these things . Theres a lot of diversity. We have some public option funded through taxes, some are funded through fees. Some are cross subsidize, some dont. And so funding is really important question but the touchstone is for a public option to work it has to guarantee universal access at an affordable price. Otherwise, its not really an option for most of the people in the general public. And the final question is how to frame the problem. We talk about the public option in healthcare as Health Insurance, but couldnt we talk about Public Hospitals . I mentioned subways are a public option for transportation. They compete with cars which is a private option, but is that the right way to think about it or doing a public option for cars like a public car . That isnt an answer to this question. Different people of different views about it but part of the goal of the book is to get us thinking about having debate on exactly these questions of what level of government do we want to public options . How do you want to design fit of what parse parts and what kindf services . The bottom line is as americans we dont have to resign ourselves to vicious capitalism. We dont have to resign ourselves to extremely complicated policies that are a function of tax credits and regulations and so on. And i get public action and markets are incompatible is simply false. Public options are way for us to break through that and right now even though they are very old idea in some ways we think they are way for jacobi on the treaty of detroit, beyond neoliberalism i think about a different way of addressing equality and markets today. Thank you very much. I appreciate your being here, and i would love to hear your thoughts and questions. We have a microphone up here in the front so if you want to come up and get in line i would love to hear what anyone thinks. I guess my [applause] thanks. Ill just ask you if you could introduce yourself that would be great, too. Good to see you. I have a question which is about pricing. And im thinking when you have a public option, my perception is one of the main concerns is that theres a tendency to press drive hybrid options out of business. I guess one of the concerns is, im thinking particularly after the broadband example, lets say the city of chattanooga comes in and offers gigabyte internet for a much lower price than any private Internet Provider can offer. That wou