McCain and his Radical Agenda

Bob Herbert picks up a theme that’s been percolating on the blogosphere for a few days1 – John McCain wants to screw you over while privatizing healthcare. I’m sure there will be a few corporations that will prosper handsomely under McCain’s plan, but not anyone that you know, especially after McCain’s poison pill has a few years to wreck havoc.

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense — lipstick, celebrities and “Drill, baby, drill!”

For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.

“It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

[From Bob Herbert – McCain’s Radical Agenda – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

The Dallas Morning News wrote, back in August:

Democratic health care proposals may have gotten more attention during the primaries, but Republican John McCain’s plan just might be more revolutionary.

The GOP nominee-to-be wants to tax workers on the value of the insurance they receive from employers.

At the same time, everyone would be offered a federal tax credit to help them pay for insurance – whether a company plan or one purchased on their own. Buyers could subtract up to $5,000 from their federal tax tab come April 15. Or they could simply sign over the credit to an insurer in order to purchase coverage.

North Texas employers are not saying they would drop employee coverage altogether if Mr. McCain’s plan were enacted.

But some do say the plan, which Mr. McCain detailed in July, would encourage young and healthy workers to forgo company coverage, purchasing insurance on their own rather than paying income taxes on the benefit. That would leave employers with only the costly sick workers to insure.

And that, they said, could eventually lead to the death of company-provided health plans.

[From McCain’s health insurance plan: More radical than Democrats’? | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News ]

Parking Garage Crosses

Bob Herbert continues:

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.

Footnotes:
  1. I read it here first, and subsequently other places too numerous to cite []

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