McCain's Health Care Plan is Unhealthy for America, And Would Not Help the Uninsured

In the recent quasi-debate, Sarah Palin used her folksy, pit bull with lipstick demeanor to defend the same disastrous policies that have failed us for the past eight years. She couldn't identify a single area where she or John McCain would change George W. Bush's economic or foreign policy positions.

Palin, winking and blinking, and evoking her alleged “small town values” at every turn, offered no real change. Just hearing her whiny speaking voice for four more years would drive me to drink. Where did she get that accent? It is not Alaskan that I know of, even though I lived there for a number of years. “You betcha” is Minnesotan, not Alaskan. Is the accent something she made up also?

Using that often condescending voice and her wolf-like smile, she railed against the Wall Street her party created, talking about greed as if the Republicans and deregulation had not stoked the current conflagration, and acting as if some real regulation would not help us at all. Well, tough talk without regulation will do what we have now – nothing! And McCain-Palin promises us more posturing and more nothing.

The change we need is fixing this broken economy from the bottom up -- not tax breaks for the wealthy and huge corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas. Let's be clear: Governor Palin and Senator McCain are offering nothing but more of the same failed Bush policies at home and abroad, trying to disguise them in the rhetoric of change.

Americans need real solutions and real change. Not only are John McCain’s ads full of smoke and mirrors, so are his proposed policies. As Senator Joe Biden pointed out in the debate, McCain’s health care plan would not help the currently uninsured. Indeed, it would put more people on the uninsured rolls. The McCainanites strike again! They will be tampering with your existing health care coverage, in the name of the wonders of the free market.

John McCain's proposed health care plan is likely to result in higher overall health care spending than Sen. Barack Obama's, says Kenneth E. Thorpe, PhD, Emory University health policy researcher.

Thorpe, professor of health policy and management at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, is the author of two analyses that detail estimated savings from both the McCain and Obama proposed plans. (www.emory.edu/policysolutions/) Under McCain's plan, 14 million adults would face either denials of coverage or pre-existing condition waivers in today's individual health insurance market. If all employers dropped coverage, over 65 million adults would face the same fate, Thorpe's analysis notes.

"Sen. McCain's health care plan would change where and how many Americans secure health insurance," says Thorpe. "It would also change how insurance is bought and paid for. These are significant changes from the current system." The central tenet of McCain's health care plan is to withdraw the current tax exclusion of employer health insurance contributions and treat them as taxable income.

In exchange, McCain would provide refundable tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of purchasing insurance in the non-group private market. This would not help the uninsured, many who pay a small amount of taxes because of low incomes, and would actually cost employed people thousands of dollars. Thanks, McCain. More of the same priviatizing Republican bull crap.

In addition, McCain proposes that higher-risk, chronically ill patients secure health coverage through state high-risk pools. The plan is not specific on the mechanism for assuring Guaranteed Access Plan (GAP) coverage, and does not address how generous subsidies would need to be. But even if the overall cost of insurance for high-risk populations were capped at 50 percent higher than the current total cost of employer-sponsored insurance, the federal costs of this portion of McCain's health plan would approach $70 billion per year.

In contrast, Obama's health care proposal could reduce national health care spending by $200 billion to $275 billion and federal spending by approximately $100 billion by the year 2012.

Obama's health care plan, says Thorpe, includes a number of components designed to improve the quality of care and make health care more affordable over time. Key initiatives in the Obama plan include broad-scale adoption of health information technology, along with changes in financial incentives for physicians to promote evidence-based, best practice coordinated care management programs. In addition, Obama's plan encourages wider use of lifestyle change and wellness programs designed to reduce obesity and its associated costly conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

The reality is, McCain’s proposals would greatly increase the number of uninsured Americans, while also doing nothing about health care costs except increasing the number of people who can’t afford good quality health care for themselves and their families.

Once again, it is hocus-pocus. The Republicans have rhetoric saying they are doing one thing, but they are really doing another, and the plan is ideology –driven, not by what is actually best for all the people.