McCain’s Health Care Plan: Increases Taxes, Decreases Coverage

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/04/29/mccains-health-care-plan-increases-taxes-decreases-coverage/

by Seth Michaels, Apr 29, 2008

Today in Tampa, Fla., Sen. John McCain gave an address his advisers claimed would “unveil” his health care proposal—but he essentially offered the same tired proposal he’s been touting for months. Most policy analysts agree this plan won’t cut costs, won’t cover more people and won’t fix the real problems in the health care system.



McCain wants to address our nation’s health care crisis by merely shifting costs around—and millions of people would pay higher health care costs as a result. McCain would tax health care benefits as income and push more people out of group insurance pools and into the often-predatory private market. In short, McCain would increase our taxes and ensure fewer of us could afford quality health care.


AFL-CIO union members in Florida were on hand as McCain spoke to ask him to change course and offer some real answers on health care.

Yesterday, McCain met with a father and son at a Florida hospital and listened to the father’s story of his struggle to pay for his son’s health care. But McCain didn’t mention that his plan would leave that nine-year-old boy without coverage. How’s that for straight talk?


Economist Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, says McCain’s health care proposal shows little comprehension of the issue. Indeed, Hickey says, the proposal is “a dangerous fraud” and based on a theory “contradicted by the facts.”


McCain’s health care plan, as it currently exists, wouldn’t lower costs or expand coverage. Instead, through changing the tax system for health benefits, it could result in many employers cutting off health benefits altogether.

The massive upheaval that would result—millions of families losing their health coverage on the job and then having to try to find an insurance company that would sell them a new policy that would cover their families—that’s not an unintended consequence of his proposal. That chaotic loss of health security is exactly what McCain intends to happen. He wants us all to buy insurance not as part of a group—like an employee group or a co-op—that can negotiate for better coverage at lower premiums, but as individuals, at the mercy of the private insurance companies.

FULL story at link.