VOTE McCAIN, LOSE YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE….Bob Herbert provides a preview of a new paper that analyzes the effects of John McCain’s healthcare proposals:
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.
….According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”
The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”
Remember: this is a feature, not a bug. Republicans think Americans use too much healthcare, and they figure that the best way to fix this is to make it more expensive. So that’s what McCain’s plan does. It’s a pretty typical specimen of the “more skin in the game” plan beloved of conservative think tanks.
