Our friends in the public power movement—all those customers, managers and politicians who depend on rural electric and publicly-owned utilities—need to stand up and proclaim the benefits of the public option for health insurance.
Many years ago, another heated debate pitted those in need of basic services against those skeptical of big government. The privately-owned utilities, it seems, didn't want to sell their product to everyone. There were compelling advantages in building your power lines in big cities, where most of the customers were. Small towns and farms were spread out, and thus too expensive to serve. Some of the more arrogant folks running Wall Street and these emerging monopolies questioned whether ranchers and farmers should even have utility service.
Fortunately there were more farmers then, and it was another time when we needed our government. In a complicated debate over many years, Congress and the states created the public power industry: a public option. During the Depression, we authorized subsidized financing through the Rural Electrification Administration. We allowed municipal utilities to finance their systems through tax-exempt bonds. Most dramatically, our governments adopted the "preference clause" in dozens of laws enacted to develop public resources.
Washington, DC (NFU release) -For those who don't know about this "preference," these laws are the bases for allocating the inexpensive hydroelectric power generated at all those Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers dams located all over the country: Hoover Dam, and all those other monumental projects on the Missouri, Columbia, Colorado and other rivers. Since many of these developments were authorized at the same time that the big utilities were being so greedy, first some states and then Congress decided that the new rural electric and municipal utilities should get a "preference" on the electricity from these public powerplants. The "public" got the juice. And it turned out that the public power, built without any profit motive, was cheaper than what the private utilities would sell. With the preference as their backbone, the rural electrics and municipal utilities prospered.
In the 1930s the utility companies, backed by Wall Street, cried "socialism" and "big government." Those in the countryside, out in our red states, defended (and still defend) public power as the best response to monopolistic abuse and a failure to serve. One famous governor likened public power to the "broomstick in the closet," needed to clean up and threaten those denying a basic need.
Defenders of the preference resources need to stand up for the public option in healthcare. All those rural state Senators and Members of Congress particularly, whose constituencies depend on public power, need to share their grandparents' wisdom on public competition. Our government, again asked to help those in need of basic services, ought to be imaginative enough to respond to a system that denies affordable care to all.
