The SEIU released a report about the true value of health care reform in the state of California. Read the excerpts below about public option and choice:

Increasing Choice and Portability while Reducing Costs
An essential part of any comprehensive health reform proposal must be to provide American families with more ways to attain quality, affordable health coverage. Providing Americans with a public option would increase options for Americans choosing their health care plans, and allow them to keep their insurance, even when they switch jobs. This new option could also help to remove many of the barriers placed between patients and their doctors by supplying healthy market competition against huge, often monopolistic insurance companies.

• Insurance Monopolies Come Between Patients and Their Doctors.
• Lack of choice and competition in the health insurance market is coming between California patients and their doctors. According to the American Medical Association, consolidated insurance markets "systematically undermine" the physician's role, by giving large insurance companies too much power.

• 94 percent of United States health care markets are considered highly concentrated, meaning that one company or a small group of companies control a great deal of the market. In California, the top two insurance providers control 58 percent of the health care market share.

• Consumers Are Left To Fend For Themselves In Current System "Competition today takes place on a restricted terrain, with each plan cutting its own deal and costs shifted back and forth across plans and providers. Patients-- the ultimate "consumers" of care--generally do not have much choice of health plans and, in many cases, even of providers, and they are often left to go it alone in dealing with the complicated and sometimes harmful practices of other players in the system."

• Introducing Public Health Insurance Plan Will Provide Real Competition, New Choice For Consumers "Healthy competition requires not an endless array of choices--indeed, the evidence suggests that too many choices can impair consumer judgment. Rather, it requires a reasonable number of meaningfully different choices. One of the key reasons for public plan choice is that public plans can offer a set of valued features that private plans are generally either unable or unwilling to provide."

• Competition Drives Down Costs for Consumers. Competition between public and private plans will drive down costs for consumers by forcing private plans to cut costs to compete. "It is the competition between private plans and public health insurance, with its distinctive cost control advantages, that presses both public and private plans to provide more for less and ensures that the goal of affordable quality coverage can be maintained over time at a price the nation can bear."

• The Public Health Insurance Option Would Enhance the Insurance Market By Providing
• Stability to Consumers. Consumers would be less vulnerable to fluctuations in premiums, would have steady access, and a more stable insurance environment with the addition of the public option. "One of the key reasons for public plan choice is that public plans can offer a set of valued features that private plans are generally either unable or unwilling to provide. Stability, wide pooling of risks, transparency, affordability of premiums, broad provider access, the capacity to collect and use patient information on a large scale to improve care--these are all hallmarks of public health insurance that private plans have inherent difficulties providing."

Read the entire Value of Reform in California report here: