McCain’s Health Plan…Will It Help or Hurt You?
Will John McCain’s Health Care Plan Help or Hurt You? With the economy spiraling out of control, it’s important that we can all be secure in the availability, and quality of our health care. If you have a pre-existing condition, are receiving your health care through your employer, or are a woman…You may be in trouble with a McCain Health Care Plan. Here is some of the latest information, let me know what you think in comments.
Journal Disputes McCain’s Health Care Claims
Senator John McCain’s top domestic policy adviser, former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, recently said in a conference call with reporters that Mr. McCain’s health care proposal would “put 25 to 30 million individuals out of the ranks of the uninsured, into the ranks of the insured.” In an article released Tuesday, a panel of prominent health economists concludes that Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s projection is off by, well, 25 to 30 million.
The article, published in the journal Health Affairs, argues that “initially there would be no real change in the number of people covered as a result of the McCain plan.” After a short-term reduction of 1 million in the number of people without coverage, the number of uninsured would increase by 5 million after five years, the authors predict. There are currently 45 million people without insurance, or 15 percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau.
On Obama’s Health Care Plan…
By comparison, Senator Barack Obama’s plan, which would provide heavy government subsidies for insurance for low-income workers, would reduce the number of uninsured by 18 million in 2009 and by 34 million in 2018, according to the Urban Institute/Brookings Institution report. That would still leave Mr. Obama well shy of his goal of achieving universal coverage.
Think You Know John McCain? His Health Care Plan Will Penalize Women…
Presidential candidate John McCain’s health care reform plan would have a devastating impact on women, according to a new analysis.
“Tens of millions of women would be at risk of losing their current insurance coverage even though they use health care services more frequently than men, suffer chronic illness more often than men, and require maternity care and other reproductive health services,” concludes a report by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The aim of McCain’s health care plan is to break up the existing employer based health care coverage system and replace it with a market-oriented system funded in part by the government.
Employers that currently offer health care coverage would find fewer incentives to continue doing so under the McCain plan. Instead, individuals would be given a tax credit of $2,500 (families would receive $5,000) so that they could shop around on the open market for the best plan for them, whether that insurer is based in the same state or not. The catch, though, is that the private insurance market doesn’t treat women that well.
The study reports that if McCain’s plan is implemented, “more than 30 million women with employer-sponsored health insurance who suffer from a chronic condition could lose their coverage, find it harder to obtain coverage, or have to purchase supplemental insurance to cover their chronic condition.”
From MedPage Today…
McCain never talks much about his healthcare plan. Probably because it’s not an issue the Republicans fare well on, while it is a core Democratic issue. Maybe also because his plan doesn’t really offer much to take on the critical issues in American healthcare today. He’s got a plan, because it’s sort of obligatory to have one, but it’s just not an important issue to him or a core part of his campaign to be elected. (Which is unfortunate for him, because healthcare still ranks highly on the list of voters’ concerns.) But there’s been a lot of talk recently about the McCain health plan, after the journal Health Affairs published a review of the estimated impact of the plan. My take home points from the wider discussion are these:
- This is an incredibly risky scheme. For the past 60 years, healthcare in this country has been financed through employers. While this is a poor system at best, McCain’s plan to tax healthcare benefits as income will radically change that. McCain’s plan is to replace this system with: nothing at all, tossing 20 million consumers into the private insurance market to sink or swim on their own.
- This scheme places consumers’ health at risk. The cross-state marketing of insurance means that insurers will domicile in states with the least protections and safeguards for consumers.
- This represents a hidden tax increase on consumers. Yes, there is a tax credit of $5,000 per family, but with a family premium costing upwards of $11,000 annually, it is not hard to see that most families will wind up paying more out of pocket, and paying more in taxes. (Some analysts differ on this point.) And for those employers who continue to offer health care as a benefit, it represents a massive payroll tax increase, making job creation more difficult.
- Roughly 20 million consumers would be forced into the private insurance market, which typically features higher premiums, higher deductibles and lower benefits.
- Patients with pre-existing conditions would be commercially uninsurable and no viable market exists to cover them, neither now or in the McCain plan.
- More people are estimated to become uninsured under this plan, which also does nothing to remedy the 45 million who are currently uninsured.
From Bitter Analysis: McCain’s Health Care Plan May Make You Sick…
Are you one of the 158 million Americans who are covered by a health care plan by your employer?
Have you heard that John McCain wants to impose a tax on that benefit, based upon what premium your employer pays for you, while simultaneously providing a refundable annual tax credit of $2500 for an individual, or $5000 for a family, that may, or may not, cover the tax increase? But there’s more: the real possibility that your employer may terminate your company’s health care plan, under the pretense that the workers will be better off choosing a plan on their own, partially paid for by that tax credit.
On July 6, 2008, USATODAY.com carried an Associated Press article entitled, “McCain’s health plan: A threat to employer plans?” It describes McCain’s plan and its possible side affects:
Here is a video clip of Elizabeth Edwards on the Obama and McCain Health Care plans…
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Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere
