Roosevelt's Un-American New Deal Public Options, Fixing a Flawed Private Market.

It continues to baffle me how so much historical information has eluded the American public, basically keeping them in the dark, forcing all of us to repeat history if we're lucky. Their are many that don't want us to repeat what worked, like the Republican Party. Take for instance this article in the NY Times, "Roosevelt Understood the Power of a Public Option" By ADAM COHEN:

As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt crusaded for “public power,” government-owned electric plants. He was outraged by the high prices that monopolistic utility companies were charging and by their refusal to bring electricity to rural parts of the state, which, they said, could not be done economically. Public plants, Roosevelt said, could bring power to those who needed it and serve as a yardstick for measuring and keeping in check the prices charged by private power companies.

Many decades later ... the debate over health insurance reform is the so-called public option. Critics have tried to paint it as a wild-eyed experiment, but it echoes F.D.R.’s battles for public power ... that a government program could fix the flaws in a poorly functioning private market — applies with even more force in health care.

To Roosevelt, it was an important social justice issue. When he ran for president in 1932, Roosevelt made public power a cornerstone of his campaign. Critics accused Roosevelt of Bolshevism ... Public power was no more radical, he said, than the public mail. During his first 100 days in office, he backed a bill to create the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal authority that brought affordable electricity to an impoverished 40,000-square-mile stretch of the rural South.

In 1935, he brought government into the electricity business in another way. By executive order, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, which used federal money and local farm co-ops to lay electric lines in parts of the country that private companies had no interest in serving. The R.E.A. drove down electricity prices and helped bring lighting, sewing machines and radios to the 90 percent of rural Americans who were without them.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options ... The Farm Credit Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Act used government funds to save farms and homes of Americans who would have been foreclosed on by private lenders. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation saved the private banking system by insuring savings accounts, which made the public willing to put money back in private banks. Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

As for cost, opponents of the public option may fear it would work too well — that to compete, private insurers would have to keep their prices down and the quality of their services up. The private insurers and lawmakers claim it would be a radical break from how things have been done in this country. In reality, it follows directly from the New Deal tradition that created many of the mainstays of American society.

We could all learn from history. And I'm not talking about the "revisionist" one.