McCain’s Health Care Plan Risky (According to ultra-liberal AJ&C that is)

Quick test: Which presidential candidate offers the most radical new approach for health care coverage in the United States?

If you listen to the spin-meisters denouncing universal health care as “socialized medicine,” you’d answer Democrat Barack Obama. But by far, the most radical plan belongs to John McCain. The Republican candidate would essentially destroy the foundation on which the current health insurance system is based and replace it with a dubious plan to let the marketplace work its magic.

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade with banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation,” McCain wrote in a recent issue of the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries, the people who determine your rates for, among other things, health insurance....snip..........Obama’s plan is hardly perfect. At best, it would leave about 6 percent of the under-65 population without any coverage, compared with 17 percent now. But Obama proposes to build on the basics of employment-based insurance, adding requirements to make insurers accept all applicants. Those ideas are, far and away, preferable to McCain’s reckless plan

Obama, on the other hand, would stop insurance companies from risk-rating individuals. He would create a new government-subsidized plan that would take in as many as 30 million Americans (almost as many as Medicare has now) that would spread the risks widely so that no one is discriminated against because of health status. So the Obama plan, unlike McCain’s, would significantly lower the barriers to affordable health insurance for most Americans now denied it or who have been priced out of the market.

Excuse my ignorance Mr. Editorialist, but isn't Obama'a plan to force insurance companies to accept buyers who can't afford the premiums essentially very similar to the sub-prime lending policies that put huge mortgage companies plus Freddiemac and Fanniemay into bankruptcy requiring hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for a bailout that may not work but will put a damper on the US economy for years to come? That's just what we don't need in the next few critical years, another near-trillion dollar bailout, this time for the insurance companies to keep another bankrupted industry alive for the sake of a socialized medical insurance scheme that will inevitably deliver sub-standard health care, as it does in other nations which have socialized their health care systems.

Right. Subprime for health care. It’ll work beautifully.

Our health care industry is screwed up not because government is not involved enough, but because it is too involved (sound familiar?). Health care insurance not being taxed leads to employers offering such coverage to employees. Lo and behold if employees and their families don’t consume a lot more health care than they would if they had to pay for the full amount instead of a fraction of the cost. Naturally, the cost of health care insurance goes up and the government creates new laws which make life easier for businesses, and not as easy for employees (eg HMOs).

In spite of all this, the true number of uninsured in this country who cannot afford coverage is something like 15 mil. The market is not ‘broken.’ It’s the government intervention that is. But, of course, this is not easy to explain to cracksmokers who believe that the ‘government should do what it can for the people’ and that the market fails in the provision of almost everything.

When I feel vindictive, sometimes I wish that stupid voters get what they want. One day they’ll wake up and realize that having the government in every nook and cranny of your life sucks. Yeah, it won’t be the Gestapo, but it’ll be the bland face of federal government bureaucracy they will have to fight more and more in their lives. Since our culture is all about instant gratification, I would imagine that sooner or later these jokers will figure it out...when it’s too late.

What genius wants the same group that brought you the Postal Service controlling vital aspects of your health care? I can understand the poor, ignorant, and slackers might think it’s a good deal, but how do we account for the educated and successful doing all they can for this nonsense? I guess they suppose that they’ll always be able to opt out of the system. Yeah, how many can afford to send their kids to private schools while they’re being forced to pay for public schools though their property taxes?

I have no sympathy for anyone who makes good money and wants socialism. I know, your main issues are abortion “rights” and whether or not homosexuals can sign up for some kind of bastardized version of “marriage” which doesn’t count with that great Spirit in the Sky.

If you think about it, abortion and homosexual marriage lead many to place their truck with socialism. Lifestyle trumps all. This is why the GOP needs to be stalwart in its defense of economic freedom. Unfortunately, the GOP is no longer a small government party.

God help us all.

This is a problem for literal conservatives. That is those who embrace the status quo no matter where it is on the political spectrum.

And that has long been why they lose in fights like health care. Leftists and liberals are always pushing to create socialized medicine. By just trying to hold the line, conservatives create a “static defense”, which Napoleon Bonaparte observed “is slow suicide.”

Instead we have to push back, to de-socialize our medical system. To get government out of the system as much as possible. And for the first time in a long time, it seems this is what McCain is proposing.

But it shouldn’t stop there. Social Security was originally intended to be a retirement system *solely* for minimum wage workers with no other means of retirement. But leftists and liberals wanted to make it a universal retirement system for everybody but the government, so they kept forcing people into the system.

So in that case, what needs to be done is move people who shouldn’t be there out of the system. This can be done sensibly without screwing anyone out of their money, and at the same time, it will leave behind a *real* retirement system, with enough money for retired minimum wage workers to have a *good* retirement, not just a couple hundred dollars a month.

People who are receiving Social Security right now should continue to do so. Instead of means testing, however, if they continue to earn income, they should be offered slightly *more* money in tax deductions than they would get in cash. Their choice. Slowly the rest of people who have contributed are added, both discontinuing their payment of FICA and offering them tax deductions for what they already contributed.

Done gradually, nobody gets hurt, and the sticker shock isn’t too great to the government that has misspent all that money for years.

Other socialist programs should be cleanly ended, including the government agencies that promulgate it. They were never authorized by the constitution in the first place, so we are better off without them.

A Marxist is exactly right, his socialized health care scheme is right in line with every other failed Marxist scheme he wants to install in what was formerly the constitutional republic known as the US of A.

If that abominable fraud can mesmerize enough brain dead fools to get himself elected the US is in for the worst four years, or more if he can get it by hook or crook, since the great depression, and I don't mean just the economy. Although, the fiscal disaster will be far more than bad enough by itself if a majority Democratic Congress backs him up on his Marxist agenda.

Well, soon enough we will have a Social Security crisis. I’m not holding my breath. We have coward politicians who aren’t willing to act or who easily cave. We saw what happened with Bush’s attempt. Naturally the proposal ended up being set up to benefit a few large funds.

As always, the ultimate solution is to live your life richly and be as independent of the state your neighbors seek to force on you as possible. In this sublime socialist system you’ll still be free while others who thought their grand desires would bring peace and joy will be greatly disappointed.

Yeah, how many can afford to send their kids to private schools while they’re being forced to pay for public schools though their property taxes?

Not an awfully lot, including my son, who makes a decent paycheck as a pilot for a major airline, and his wife home schools my two grandkids to avoid the $17,000 annual tuition it would have taken to keep them in the academically excellent private school my grand daughter attended until 5th grade. Neither of them have ever darkened the door of a government school since my grand daughter started 1st grade 6 years ago in that private school, and they are both miles ahead in every field of study than their same-age friends who have attended only government schools.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Obama will do all he can to end home schooling and severely restrict private schooling if he is elected. It's much easier and more effective to instill Marxism into young skulls full of mush rather than when they have become adults.

But leftists and liberals wanted to make it a universal retirement system for everybody but the government, so they kept forcing people into the system.

That becomes necessary after a relatively short time for a Ponzi scheme such as SS to appear to work as the recipients gradually begin to outnumber the duped contributors.

My dad's first SS payroll deduction was 25 cents per week in the late 1930s, but when he died in 1997 he had received many thousands of admittedly inflated dollars more in SS checks than he paid into the scheme over the span of his 40+ year working life.

Health care insurance not being taxed leads to employers offering such coverage to employees. Lo and behold if employees and their families don’t consume a lot more health care than they would if they had to pay for the full amount instead of a fraction of the cost.

Golllleee, who wudda thunk it, "free" stuff leads people to use more of it, astounding aint it?

I know, your main issues are abortion “rights” and whether or not homosexuals can sign up for some kind of bastardized version of “marriage” which doesn’t count with that great Spirit in the Sky

While those moral/Christian issues are very important to me and my family, they certainly aren't alone in our broad field of concerns. The fiscal health of the nation will be one of the most critical issues the nation will contend with as we descend ever deeper into collectivist policies and programs at every level of government from the city commission to the US Congress and the Oval Office.

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