I had a chance this morning to catch part of John McCain's speech in Tampa, while getting the family car checked out, and posted this originally on my blog while watching. I've written a lot about health care since I began blogging, partly because I worked for a time in medical advertising, and partly because of the experience I had growing up with my Mom, a healthcare educator with considerable depth of knowledge in the field. I encourage anyone looking to find out more about the proposal to click on the various links, which provide a wealth of additional detail and data.
McCain has clearly learned something about the rhetoric of the healthcare debate; to his credit he did a compelling job laying out the problem - he was more frank than I've seen Republicans be about admitting that the uninsured are a real and significant problem (the right has wasted a lot of energy disputing the notions of 47 million uninsured, trying to blame the lion's share on illegal immigration and temporary unemployment, to no avail). He also emphasized - just as rightly - the challenges of rising costs and access to healthcare, and how insurance serves as the way into the system, which hurts people without coverage.
Which is what makes his proposed "solution" so ludicrous.
I was actually worried, as he laid out the problem, that McCain had actually had a "come to Jesus" moment during his time off and moderated his initial proposal, made months ago. I needn't have worried: McCain is still pushing the notion of some combination of increased health savings accounts and tax credits to individuals ($2,500 to individuals, $5,000 to families) as a means to reduce costs of insurance. This, he says, will stimulate such a level of increased competition for coverage, that insurance costs will drop, and everyone, like magic, will be insured.
Yawn.
Let's just steamroll through this, shall we? Here's what's wrong with the proposal:
The point, though, is that this is the real definition of boring: McCain's plan was pretty much DOA when he proposed it, and it's just deader when he repeats it: if McCain plans to lay out the problem as well as he did today, then more than a few people will notice... his plan doesn't actually address the problems he brings up. Moreover, talking about this really only helps Democrats, who've made healthcare a far more central component of the election debate, and have more credibility on the topic. McCain is bucking almost all of the right to pull this issue to the fore, when many conservatives would say there's not a problem... or at least not one that government can solve.
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