Health care in the last debate, with my own personal experience added in

[jaderabbit]

I was pleased with the last American presidential debate. It was an interesting, lively format, and we heard some details we hadn't heard before.

Health care is a big issue for our family. Although we're all healthy right now (knock wood), we've had some big scares, and we know the value of good insurance.

When I was pregnant, I worked full-time and

Comments

[auros]

McCain believes, religiously, that the market is always the solution. His plan, therefore, is to shove as many as people as possible into that market, and give the firms as much freedom as possible to make their policies more complicated, confusing, and discriminatory.

That $5k-per-family tax credit is funded by eliminating business' tax credit for covering health insurance. It's estimated that this will lead to roughly 20M people losing their employer-sponsored health insurance. And since the average family plan costs $12k, even if you could get the same plan, you'd be $7k in the hole. Now, McCain says that if they're no longer covering healthcare, employers will just roll that benefits money into your paycheck, making up the missing $7k. Call me cynical, but I don't see employers being all that enthusiastic about an across the board pay raise for their employees. When they cut benefits, there's not going to be anything close to a fully compensatory raise.

Finally, by allowing interstate shopping for policies, McCain will encourage healthy people to buy cheap policies in states with no significant regulation over what needs to be covered. As a result, these people will have less coverage than they should, so the ones that actually get really sick will be almost as badly off as the uninsured. Additionally, the people who are older or generally in poorer health will not be able to get these policies, so they'll be in a shrinking pool of "high risk" insurance applicants; if they can get insurance at all, the premiums will be unaffordable.

In sum, as bad as our current situation is, McCain's plan would make it exponentially worse.

[jaderabbit]

You bring up a good point. It's not like we'll all get a $5,000 check in the mail if McCain is elected.