McCain & Co.: U.S. Health Care Is Broken. Let’s Make It Worse

by Mike Hall, Oct 15, 2008

The Institute for America’s Future has launched a discussion to explore long-term solutions to the critical problems the nation faces. The campaign kicked off last month, with experts writing about issues such as trade and the economy, and includes ads in the op-ed section of The New York Times demanding a debate worthy of our great nation. The latest looks at the nation’s health care crisis. Join the discussion online at the Institute for America’s Future.

Everybody out there who believes that what this nation’s failing health care system needs is the deregulation-at-any-cost, free market, unfettered system that’s worked so well with our financial markets, raise your hands.

Just guessing, but it’s a good bet there aren’t a lot of hands pointing skyward. Yet there is a gang of conservative, far-right think tanks, groups and individuals, including Sen. John McCain, who wants to replicate the Wall Street/financial recipe for disaster to reform our nation’s health care system.

As the institute’s latest ad—Will We Let Conservatives Do to Health Care What They Did to Banking?—warns:

As if our health care system were not in deep crisis already, conservatives want to make it worse.

116 million Americans are now uninsured, or underinsured, or financially vulnerable to unexpected medical costs—now the #1 cause of family bankruptcies. Those who have insurance are paying higher costs for policies that often have gaping holes in coverage. And insurance companies flat-out refuse to sell coverage to those already sick.

In September, McCain wrote an article in an insurance industry magazine supporting deregulation of the health insurance industry. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman characterized McCain’s proposal this way:

Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago—and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

Roger Hickey, co-director of the Institute for America’s Future, puts it this way:

The global financial crash of the past few weeks has hammered home what should be common sense: a free market needs reasonable rules that safeguard the public interest. When you unshackle corporations and put the cops who would police them in handcuffs, ultimately everyone loses in the ensuing chaos.

McCain and his free marketers want to eliminate state regulations that provide much-needed protections for working families who must buy their own private health insurance, including preventive care, routine exams, tests, pregnancies and, in some states, guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Right. The private insurance industry, with no prodding, will cover pre-existing conditions. If that’s the case, the industry would have done so all along.

Last week on MSNBC.com, Jonathan Cohn wrote about a Florida woman who, four months after surgery to remove a growth from her fallopian tube that turned out not be cancerous, was contacted by her insurance company. The company informed her that an examination of her records found a one-time notation from years before that they claimed proved the growth was a pre-existing condition.

She not only was hit for the $15,000 hospital and doctors’ bill, but the insurance company claimed because of her “pre-existing condition” her premiums should have been higher and billed her for seven years of higher premiums. Says Cohn:

It’s those who must purchase their own coverage, typically because they are self-employed or work for a company that doesn’t provide benefits, who are in a uniquely precarious position.

If you’re buying your own health insurance, not only will you pay higher premiums than those who get a bulk rate as part of a group policy, but insurers in most states have much greater leeway to turn you down.

When confronted with an applicant who has any kind of medical history (including routine issues such as allergies, a past cesarean section delivery or acid reflux), insurers are usually perfectly free to charge much higher rates or to deny coverage altogether.

Not only do McCain and his extremist economic gurus want to unleash the private insurance industry, they want to force more of us into the private market and out of the employer-provided health insurance that covers more than 160 million workers and their families. As the institute says:

They propose to tax, as income, the health benefits that 160 million people get on the job. This is purposely designed to destroy the incentive for companies to provide health insurance to their workers.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and other experts predict that 20 million Americans would lose good employer-sponsored group health insurance. Instead they’d be left on their own—perhaps with a partial tax credit—trying to buy inferior and expensive coverage directly from deregulated insurance companies.

Anyone already sick will have one hell of a time finding insurance at any price.

EPI economist Josh Bevins sums up the McCain plan this way:

It’s hard to think of any other change that could do more harm than this one to a health care system that’s already weakened.

Last week, Newsweek economics correspondent Jane Bryant Quinn wrote that if McCain’s health care plan was put into effect, it would drop 20 million people from employer coverage and force them to navigate through the treacherous private insurance world. She also says McCain’s plan “will raise your costs without changing the game.”

Writes Hickey:

Medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy, so one medical crisis can easily tip a family over the edge. In these fragile economic times, it’s foolhardy and downright hardhearted to raise the cost of health insurance.

The institute calls for a health care reform program that mirrors the proposals of Sen. Barack Obama:

We need clear rules requiring private insurance companies to cover everyone—even those with pre-existing conditions. And we need the security of knowing we can keep our current health plan, or we can choose a public plan like Medicare, so we’re not at the mercy of the same profit-driven companies that got us into this mess!

For more on McCain’s health plan, click here.

Click here for details from Obama’s health care plan, one that enables 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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