McCain Health Care Plan Extreme, Ideological, Critics Say

On the same day Republican Sen. John McCain presented his plan for health care coverage for people with preexisting illnesses or those unable to afford coverage obtain coverage, a trio of critics said his plan would be a windfall for health insurance companies and would produce even higher costs that will lead to even more Americans living without adequate, affordable coverage.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call that was broadcast on XM radio, Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a self-described strategy center for the progressive movement that functions as policy counterbalance to conservative thinking, said McCain’s ideas would “radically disrupt the functioning part of the health care system while failing to change what needs to be changed.”

Sen. McCain, 71, of Arizona, laid out his plan at a cancer center in Tampa, Florida, where he called for eliminating tax breaks employers use to provide health insurance for their workers, replacing them with $5,000 tax credit for families to buy their own insurance on the open market.

Reporting on his proposal, Michael Cooper and Kevin Sack of the New York Times said McCain wants to move away from employer-based coverage, as President Bush sought but failed to do last year, and move to market-based competition, a path diametrically opposite that of plans by his Democratic challengers, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who want insurance companies to cover everyone, favor mandates for coverage and impose new regulations on insurers. McCain favors tax incentives, wants to avoid direct regulation and would shift from employers to individuals.

Michael Shear of The Washington Post quoted McCain saying of his rivals plans they were full of "inefficiency, irrationality and uncontrolled costs." In the article, McCain said the 47 million uninsured Americans will get coverage “only when they are freed from the shackles of the current employer-dominated system.”

Hickey was joined on the call by Jacob Hacker, author of the "Health Care for America" plan and Yale University professor, who said McCain’s proposal will just shift costs from business onto ordinary workers and families and do nothing to bring down costs overall. Hacker’s plan is at the center of plans proposed by Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, who used it as the basis for their health care proposals.

“I’ll work tirelessly to address the problem,” Mr. McCain said in a speech here at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute. “But I won’t create another entitlement program that Washington will let get out of control. I won’t do it. Nor will I saddle states with another unfunded mandate.”

He wants the federal government to work with states to cover anyone unable to find insurance on the open market, and would offer federal financial assistance to states to create high-risk pools that would contract with insurers to cover consumers who have been rejected on the open market.

“He wants to dismantle employer style system, about 158 million Americans, forcing us to buy what ever they can find on the individual market, from unregulated and predatory insurance companies,” Hickey said, adding that McCain’s plan would “do nothing about the power of those system, driving costs upwards rather than downward.” Hickey said the McCain plan has “adopted the most extreme and right wing ideological approach” and predicted a “massive upheaval” of people loosing health care on the job. Hickey mocked McCain’s argument that the free market would drive costs down because consumers, by paying more themselves, would have “more skin in the game.”

“Americans have been paying more in co-pays and premiums for years. Having ‘skin the game’ means people don’t go to the doctor,” he said, noting that even conservative experts predict companies will stop providing health care as an employee benefit, forcing people to buy on the open market.

When people are forced out of a group, as they would be if their employer no longer covers them and they are forced onto into the market as individuals with no bargaining power, Hickey said they would be “at the mercy of private insurance companies” and that McCain would also favor abolishing regulations in states that hold insurance companies to a standard.

Speaking of the cost of insurance, Hickey said the tax credit of $2,500 for individual and $5,000 for families pales when compared to the approximately $12,106 per year needed to buy good insurance, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group.

He also criticized the Arizona senator for his proposal because while he will earn public relation credits from the media and others for taking on prices, his plan will do nothing about spiraling costs of health care in America. “McCain will greatly increase the number of uninsured Americans while doing nothing about health care costs, except increasing the number of Americans who won’t be able to afford it.”

Hacker said McCain’s plan is “free market theory substituted for good thinking” and that the plan is not realistic and will not be a good deal for Americans.

Taking on the market place as the best place to find health insurance, Hacker said 71 percent of people surveyed who tried to get coverage in the market place found it difficult if not unaffordable to find. He also took aim at the wasteful spending by insurance companies, noting for reporters that 43 percent of premiums were spent on administration, marketing and profit. “Universality brings cost control through greater administrative efficiency, information flows and bargaining,” he said, adding, “McCain’s plan is like handing the hen house over to the foxes.”

The third person to on the call was Karen Ackerman, political director, AFL-CIO, who minced no words in attacking the senator’s plan as a “disaster to working families struggling to stay afloat in an increasingly sour economy.” She said people with preexisting conditions will have a harder time finding health care than they do now.

“Insurance companies stand to make a killing,” she said. The size of the killing she pegged at about $1.9 billion for the 10 largest health care companies. She then outlined what her organization intends to do to confront McCain at every point on the campaign trail. She said the AFL-CIO will spend $53.4 million on a grass roots campaign that will focus on 13 million union voters in 23 battle ground states. She described a multi-layered campaign that will include doorstep canvassing, direct mail and online contact. She said states like Ohio, Missouri and Colorado will receive phone banks and that May 17^th will be her group’s national door-to-door canvass day. She also promoted the Web site www.mcainrevealed.org.

Sen. McCain's plan would push employers to drop health care coverage they currently provide and force tens of millions of Americans to fend for coverage on their own with inadequate tax credits. With health care costs rising three times faster than wages, analysts predict Sen.McCain's plan would put insurance companies in charge, increase costs and create chaos in the health care market.

In a media release to reporters following the call, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney denounced Sen. McCain’s healthcare plan as a boon for the insurance companies at the expense of working people. Sweeney promised that AFL-CIO families would be outside McCain’s tour this week - - presenting 175,000 signatures on band-aids - - to let him know that working people need healthcare reform that will give them a leg up in the souring economy, not another break for corporations and lobbyists.

Sen. McCain showed his answer to the health care crisis is morepower for the insurance industry and fewer protections for workingfamilies. He even goes so far as to tax people’s employer-provided health care benefits,” Sweeney said. “Under McCain, quality health care would become like limousines and mansions - something available only to the very rich.”

The Times article quoted Jonathan B. Oberlander, an authority on health policy and politics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, saying the differences between the two parties could not be starker. “You have one party saying we have to transform the health care system by regulating the insurance industry,” he said, “and the other party saying we have to transform the health care system by deregulating the insurance industry.”

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