You Have Too Much Health Care

[phantom power]

"The McCain Health Tax" is a good name for it. It's a $3.6 trillion dollar tax, by the McCain campaign's own estimates. And the goal of it is to eliminate the employer-based health benefit system, to tax it so much that employers won't want to provide it anymore.

Now, some might say that is something we ought to do. But it's replaced with the wilds of the individual health insurance market. Which is prohibitively more expensive than the $5,000 refundable tax credit McCain's going to offer. Businesses pay less for health care because they pool their employees for a better bargaining position. McCain's plan is the insurance industry's version of union-busting.

McCain's philosophy on health care is that Americans have too much of it, and if they only knew the costs, they would purchase less. So, 47 million luckie-duckies without health insurance, and the other 40 million who are underinsured, take note - John McCain wants you to be more frugal. Comparison shop for that leg surgery. Maybe find a discount MRI. (Not that McCain's ever done this - he's been on government-run health care his entire life and hasn't complained too much about it.)

Until now, I don't think it's been clear how truly radical McCain's health care plan really is. Bush just ignored the problem. McCain wants to actively make it worse.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/you-have-too-much-health-care-by-dday.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdnbFlax3fI

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. no such thing as too much health care.....

the fucker :grr:

[SoonerPride]

2. They want to do for healthcare what they did for the housing market

Disaster looms if this approach is attempted.

[iceman66]

3. This is very true.

McCain's "health care plan" not only operates as a HUGE tax increase on the middle class, to fund more tax cuts for the ultra-rich of course, but will result in millions more uninsured and millions more with lower-quality insurance.

He deserves to lose for that reason ALONE.

[jacksonian]

4. there is a lot of interest in the business world right now

for national health care, because so many American businesses find themselves competing against international companies not having health costs directly in their bottom lines.

McCain is trying to take the onus of employer-based health care away from business without actually setting up anything else in it's place, in a desperate attempt to derail the national health care people are gradually warming to. He is trying to counter the "business costs will go down under a national health plan" argument by eliminating all incentives for company care, thereby reducing business overhead by shoving the any cost elsewhere. The fact that "elsewhere" is "nowhere but the emergency room" is inconvenient.

The losers in all this would be the very people McCain SAID he was referring to when he said the "economy, oops, I mean American workers are sound." Evidently, the American workforce is sound enough to deserve a royal screwing.

[phantom power]

5. I was actually taken aback by how bad this is.

As the author said, this is actively making the problem much much worse.

[iceman66]

7. The goal is not to solve the problem,

but to shift even more of the tax burden to the middle class and lower costs for businesses at the expense of the health of their workers.

So from the Repug standpoint, this plan would be a big success!

[iceman66]

6. Yes.

McCain wants everyone to buy their own health care on a deregulated open market.

Of course he is perfectly content to get his OWN health care from the federal government, even though he is among the relatively few Americans who could actually afford to purchase decent health insurance.