Yes, you read that right. The average American family will spend an extra $7,500 on health insurance if John McCain's proposed health care reform is passed into law.
Ezra Klein explains it better than I can:
Joe's taking a look at McCain's health insurance place and focusing on the fact that it exposes employer health care benefits to taxation. This is a tremendous tax increase, to the tune of $3.6 trillion over 10 years. But you won't pay most of it. Rather, as it becomes less affordable for employers to pay for health care, they'll stop doing it. Put another way: You're not going to pay higher taxes, you're going to lose your health care coverage. Then you'll be in the individual market where McCain will give you a fixed tax credit -- $5,000 for a family, or about 40 percent the cost of the average plan -- to purchase care.
There's a whole theory behind this approach. McCain wants to cut total health care spending. Along with his advisers, he thinks total health care spending is too high because employers by lavish plans and employees don't realize those plans are coming out of their paychecks. If the employees were buying the plans, they'd buy cheapers ones, and use less health care. All these premises are probably true. And the outcome will be that people have less health care, and can't access needed services, and go bankrupt a lot. The bottom line is that this isn't merely a tax increase. It's a governance philosophy that holds that the problem with health insurance is that you have too much of it, and John McCain aims to change that. He has, in other words, a policy that will pay down the federal debt with money raised through human misery.
For all his anti-tax rhetoric, John McCain only cares about cutting taxes for the ultra-rich (remember, this is a guy who owns so many houses he can't even count them and thinks if you make $4.9 MM a year you're middle-class). If letting the irresponsible Bush tax cuts expire is a "tax increase," removing a $3.6 TRILLION tax credit for businesses certainly an increase.
And while the Bush tax cuts merely put a hurting on the treasury, if McCain's health care proposal becomes law, people will die.
Insurance companies can and will deny individual coverage (for any or no reason whatsoever) to people who would have been covered under their employers' group plans, thus weeding out the people who need health insurance the most. After spending his entire life being the beneficiary of government-provided health care (through the military, in Congress and now via Medicare) McCain's proposal will make health care less accessible and more expensive for the rest of us. And while our current health care system has lots of problems, "health care is too accessible and too affordable" is not one of them.
There is only one way to make real progress towards addressing our healthcare crisis is by electing Barack Obama president.
Help me make this happen - donate to his campaign today.
