Jane Bryant Quinn: McCain’s Health Care Plan Would Drop 20 Million People

by Mike Hall, Oct 7, 2008

When John McCain’s health care plan comes under scrutiny, his claims it would solve the nation’s health care crisis are easily stripped away.

Newsweek economics correspondent Jane Bryant Quinn writes that if McCain’s health care plan was put into effect, it would drop 20 million people from employer coverage and throw them into the shark tank of the private insurance world, and “will raise your costs without changing the game.”

Writing in The Nation, Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), warns McCain’s plan would turn the health care industry over to the same deregulated, “free market” philosophy that sank Wall Street.

The Wall Street Journal reports McCain’s health care plan would cut Medicare and Medicaid by $1.3 trillion.

In this week’s Newsweek, Quinn writes:

McCain’s idea is pretty simple. Tax the value of employer-paid health insurance as part of your regular income (62 percent of the non-elderly are in these plans). In return, he’d give everyone a refundable tax credit.

McCain’s health care plan, as Sen. Barack Obama pointed out yesterday in Asheville, N.C.,

…is a shell game. Sen. McCain gives you a tax credit with one hand, but raises your taxes with the other.

Those tax credits McCain says will let you buy health insurance on the private market fall far short of the cost to replace most workers’ employer-provided coverage, especially older workers who could face annual premium costs of $12,000 or more, writes Quinn. She notes that estimates from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center predict 20 million will lose their employer coverage and be forced into the private market.

What do you get in the private market?

It’s a shock to move from group plans into the harsh world of individual insurance. You get “choices” (rah, rah). But the policies cost more and cover less than company plans do—especially for women, older people and those whose health is less than perfect.

That is, if you can find coverage at all. In 2006, the Commonwealth Fund studied working-age adults hunting for individual policies. One-fifth were charged more or rejected for health reasons. More than half found it hard or impossible to secure a policy they could afford.

For those who don’t have health insurance today, they won’t under the McCain plan. Quinn writes the tax credit might move about 1 million of the 46 million uninsured off the rolls, compared to 34 million under Obama’s proposals.

If you’re uninsured, the tax credit helps you purchase coverage. The only hitch—a  big one—is that you have to be able to afford the premiums up front. The tax credit comes later. The government will send it to the insurance company, which will apply it to your account.

Quinn says conservatives love the “magic of the market place,” but DeMoro provides some chilling examples of that magical market place McCain worships.

[The] private insurance system that welcomes anyone who is sick or has a prior medical condition as if they were carrying anthrax.

…People like Karen George of Woodbridge, Va., whose insurer recently denied her coverage for surgery to treat a disconnected jawbone and insufficient airway that her physician said was life-threatening. Or Barbara Calder of Colorado Springs, who was unable to buy insurance to cover her disabling genetic disease and is moving to her native Belgium to get healthcare. Or Samuel McAdam of Thornton, Pa., whose insurer denied the oral medication he needed for his stage-four melanoma.

She points out the contradiction that while McCain and other free marketers who are “cheerleading” the $700 billion taxpayer-paid Wall Street bailout, they attack any move to enact meaningful health care for all legislation as an assault on the market place.

DeMoro also warns that McCain’s call to reduce regulations on the health care industry—echoing his decade’s long crusade to deregulate the financial and banking industries—would

strip away public protections that consumers have won in many states, such as requirements that insurers cover—such “frills” as cancer screening, diabetic supplies and minimum maternity stays.

…Reduced regulations and oversight failed spectacularly on Wall Street. They’ll make the healthcare crisis worse, as well.

Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported the McCain campaign—after months of dodging questions about where McCain gets the money for his health tax credits—admitted it was coming from some $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—the cornerstone health care programs fort the nation’s seniors, disabled and low-income families.

The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts….The McCain campaign hasn’t given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn’t dispute that analysts’ estimate.

In short: McCain’s health care plan will raise our taxes, reduce benefits, raise costs, bring a “free-market-Wall-Street” free-for-all to the health care industry and cut $1.3 trillion in senior and low-income health care.

Click here for a look at three more takes on the failures in McCain’s health care plan.

Click here for details from Obama’s health care reform plan that will allow families to keep the health care coverage they have now but also gives us a wider array of options, including a public plan, so everyone can get affordable, high-quality health care. 

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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