McCain Campaign on McCain Health Care Plan: Employer Plans Better Than Ours

by Tula Connell, Oct 28, 2008

Even the McCain campaign says its health care plan stinks.

A senior McCain adviser told CNN that “younger, healthier workers likely wouldn’t abandon their company-sponsored plans” for the health care tax credits McCain has been touting.

“Why would they leave?” said [Douglas] Holtz-Eakin. “What they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the credit.”

As Newsweek economics correspondent Jane Bryant Quinn points out, a $5,000 tax credit in the McCain plan falls far short of the cost to replace most workers’ employer-provided coverage, especially for older workers who could face annual premium costs of $12,000 or more.

Worse, the foundation of Sen. John McCain’s health care plan is a tax on employer-based health care benefits—making it real easy for strapped companies to tell their employees:

Soooo sorry. We need to cut costs. If we don’t cut off health care, we’d have to cut jobs…and you wouldn’t want that, would you?

As analysts have noted, McCain’s tax is designed to move workers out of employment-based health care and into the expensive private market. Even if we weren’t in what pundits are calling the worst economic disaster of the 21st century, adding a tax burden is incentive enough for many employers to cut off health care. In fact, some 20 million of us would lose our health benefits under McCain’s plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Citing the center’s estimates, Quinn writes that McCain’s health care plan would

raise your costs without changing the game.

And while health care premiums skyrocket, paychecks have fallen. A Families USA report finds that in some states, premium costs have risen more than eight times as fast as wages since 2000. The report, Premiums vs. Paychecks, compares the increases of wages and health care state by state. Here are a few choice battleground arenas:

• Ohio: Health care premiums rose 76.4 percent and wages 8.94 percent.
• Pennsylvania: Health care premiums rose 86.2 percent and wages 13.4 percent.
• Colorado: Health care premiums rose 74.8 percent and wages 15.5 percent.
• Missouri: Health care premiums rose 76.1 percent and wages 17.3 percent.
• Virginia: Health care premiums rose 82.5 percent and wages 20.2 percent.

McCain’s plan gets even worse. Quinn points out that the tax credit might move about 1 million of the 46 million uninsured off the rolls, compared with 34 million under Sen. Barack Obama’s health care 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.

And worse and worse and worse…McCain’s plan would:

• Cut Medicare and Medicaid by $1.3 trillion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Threaten basic services for women now required in many states, such as annual breast, ovarian and cervical cancer screening and sexually transmitted infection screening, according to a study by the Center for American Progress and the Planned Parent Action Fund.
• Give insurance companies more leeway to deny coverage to those with pre-existing health conditions and to deny care to those who do have coverage.

And then there’s McCain’s calls to reduce regulations on the health care industry—even in light of the financial debacle on Wall Street fueled by deregulation.

The above point is made clearly by a front-line registered nurse who leads a national nurse’s union. Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), an AFL-CIO affiliate union, writes in The Nation that

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

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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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