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Plan vs. "Plan"
PLAN vs. "PLAN"....Ezra Klein catches McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin accidentally telling the truth about McCain's healthcare plan:
John McCain's health care plan aims to do something very simple: Raise taxes on the employer health insurance market so individuals move to the individual health insurance market. What Doug Holtz-Eakin just said is that even McCain's top advisers realize that this will mean much worse health care coverage for everyone involved. As he put it, "what they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the [tax] credit."
Poor Douglas Holtz-Eakin. He's stuck having to defend a healthcare plan that's really a healthcare "plan." It doesn't work in theory, it doesn't work in practice, and it's not something that would appeal to most Americans in any case. But McCain needed a plan to compete with Obama's plan, and Republicans like tax credits, so that became the basis of his plan. The fact that it doesn't make sense isn't something that McCain really cares much about.
UPDATE: More here from Time's Karen Tumulty: "If Doug Holtz-Eakin doesn't believe that young, healthy people would leave the system, he might want to talk to Mitt Romney, who actually studied the situation in the real world when he was reforming the health care system in Massachusetts. It's not — as Holtz-Eakin suggests — that these healthier citizens would choose between staying with their employer-provided benefits or buying them on the open market. It's that they would decide to go uninsured entirely — leaving older and sicker people in the employer-provided system. That would make it even more expensive for employers to continue to provide coverage for their workers, accelerating a trend that we are already seeing, in which fewer and fewer companies are providing coverage."
Oddly enough, although I wouldn't like to find out by trying it, his "plan" might be the fastest way to convince Americans that they need single payer.
no, it's not "poor" holtz-eakin. he had a good reputation and he made an adult choice to sell it out for proximity to power.
he is now a paid propagandist and i hope (with no expectation of success) that he will be shunned by economists in the future (since they didn't shun mankiw, i'm almost surely not going to see this, but still).
When Karen Tumulty (Karen Tumulty!) has the inside rail to RealityWorld on you, you are in a world of your own.
You have to feel bad for this guy. He's pretty much the only guy working for McCain's campaign who hasn't said some sort of insane and/or divisive comment when asking about the polls or the policies of the campaign. (See anything related to Pfotenhauer, Nancy.) So he's basically the only guy left who can represent McCain on television, where he's forced to say incredibly stupid, irrelevant things like Obama's refusal to do town hall forums is equivalent to McCain's reversal on financial regulation.
you know the hilarious thing is this: Romney didn't think he could win the Republican nomination by trumpeting this accomplishment. And it actually is one. But he'd be far stronger against Obama than McCain was, mostly because he actually knew what he was talking about.
And Romney is right, he probably couldn't have won the nomination by talking about it. He had to run away from it and "double Guantanamo." I think that says alot about the modern Republican party right there.
But McCain needed a plan to compete with Obama's plan, and Republicans like tax credits, so that became the basis of his plan.
Yeah, but instead of just offering some vague plan that wouldn't add up (like his "plan" to balance the budget in four years), this plan is actually pretty detailed. It's unbelievably horrible, of course, and would actually be ten times worse than what we have now, but it's about the most concrete proposal he's got. The question is, why did he adopt it in the first place?
My guess is he cribbed it from either Grover Norquist or the Cato Institute. It has so much blind faith in free markets that it could only come from people who don't really understand how markets really work (i.e. libertarians).