My friends on the left (and they are my friends) are angry and upset because so many Americans with employer-provided benefits (and even many without) are unhappy about the existence of a “public option” plan. These liberal folk say “the public option won’t take away your choices. You will be able to keep the insurance that you have.” And it’s true that the plan as drafted in its various forms and trial balloons does permit people to keep their existing plan.

Unfortunately, the plan as drafted will not be dictating the economic reality once the public option is in place. Instead, market forces will. And market forces will push millions of people out of the private insurance market against their will, and could well cause a near-collapse of the private system.

If the public option is in place, employers all over the country will jump at the chance to move their employees out of costly benefit plans and into the public system. The left themselves make this argument about corporations’ willingness to move social welfare expenses onto the public shoulders. Unless the plan is punitive towards employers who do that – and it won’t be, because that would be politically suicidal for Democrats – there will be an inevitable tidal wade into the public system, not by choice, but by expulsion. Leftists will tiredly (and tiringly) argue that “oh look, it worked in THIS Swiss canton for the eight years the study conveniently ran” – ignoring the uniquely American spin that often makes those studies of dubious applicability, at best. Mr. Obama won’t have personally taken away those millions of peoples’ health insurance – he would just have made it impossibly tempting for their bosses to do it to them.

The private insurance system will be further undermined by the fact that employer-provided healthcare has one of the best demographic profiles for health insurers. People who are working tend to be younger, in better health, and to take care of themselves. The customers it will be losing to the public sector will be the profitable ones – the ones who make up for the lady who gets cancer at 49 and spends a lot of money getting better to live to 80. I know, boo hoo for the insurance companies – but without profitable customers, the companies can’t stay afloat. If it takes 3 Healthy Harrys to keep one Ailing Alice going, then anytime the public option takes away a Harry it better take a third of an Alice as well – but a lot more of the workers in those pools and their families are HH than AA. So companies go under, and companies that want to provide healthcare coverage to their workers have a hard time finding a market. The fact is that the government can “fight” for those valuable premium-payers a lot more effectively than a bunch of mopes in Connecticut can – the government has money and tanks and Congressmen. All the company has is money.

There are 88 million Americans with employer-provided healthcare, and most of them like their coverage very much. There’s no reason they wouldn’t; while it’s not a choice I’ve myself made, the security of having medical expenses covered in case of disaster is surely reassuring. That security has value to the families who know Dad getting sick won’t be the end of the world.  Liberals were correct in gauging that there is public support for health care reform – but there is zero support for taking a great whack at the stability and viability of employer-provided healthcare financed through the private insurance market.

That is why people are getting hetted up at town halls. The people waving swastikas, if they aren’t plants, are flecks of crazyfoam on a genuinely large popular upswelling of sentiment. My liberal friends, saying “we don’t intend to do that” isn’t good enough; people don’t believe it’s up to you to decide if that’s what happens. People know that their choices are going to go away, and it doesn’t really matter to them that the cause will be an impersonal market mechanism, rather than the volition of some nervously smiling Congresscritters. The Congresscritters are going to get the blame.

So perhaps Congress – and the liberals in Congress – had better think about proposing some market-reality-recognizing mechanisms that will work to improve American healthcare, without wiping out people’s dreams and security in the process.