McCain-Palin Health Plan Relies on the Very Marketplace Strategy That's Crippling Our Economy

[babylonsister]

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/99239/mccain-palin_health_plan_relies_on_the_very_marketplace_strategy_that%27s_crippling_our_economy/

McCain-Palin Health Plan Relies on the Very Marketplace Strategy That's Crippling Our Economy

By Bob Herbert, The New York Times. Posted September 18, 2008.

snip//

The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We're seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It's the beginning of the end.

When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans -- either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.

That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.

The upshot is that many more Americans -- millions more -- will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: "I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves."

Yet another radical element of McCain's plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless.

In a refrain we've heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these "needless and costly" insurance regulations.

This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans' ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.

You would think that with some of the most venerable houses on Wall Street crumbling like sand castles right before our eyes, we'd be a little wary about spreading this toxic formula even further into the health care system.

But we're not even paying much attention.

[demodonkey]

1. Lack of single payer healthcare is one of the reasons things are crumbling now.

About $900 of the cost of every new car goes to pay health "insurance" costs for the people who made it. And that's just ONE of the many reasons why our jobs and our strength go overseas -- those countries provide healthcare for their workers, so the car companies don't have to.