McCain's Health Care Plan...READ THIS NOW!

Ana Marie Cox from Time Magazine offers a post about sending McCain's Health Care Plan through actuarial analysis by her father Samuel H. Cox, a famous actuary. The resulting breakdown is staggering, to say the least.

Cox's short answer is this: IT WILL NOT WORK.

But the details show McCain's "plan" to be truly malicious and short-sighted. For example:

--There is NO incentive for employers to either start covering their employees or keep covering their employees. How many additional people will this cover? Well...none. Actually, it would, most likely, decrease the number of people sheltered from potentially catastrophic health care costs by an insurance plan. As Cox explains it:

Only about 60% of employers provide health care coverage. McCain's program removes the incentive for employers to provide it so I expect a lot of them will stop providing it. More Americans will be on their own, those with preexisting conditions will not get insurance. And it provides no incentive for employers to start covering employees. For small businesses, the situation is worse - only about 45% provide health benefits.

--Another core idea of McCain's "plan" is (you guessed it) DE-REGULATION of the insurance industry.

Another important aspect of McCain's plan is to deregulate health insurance. Now the states regulate it and provide consumer protection, solvency and other regulations. McCain says he will deregulate as``we have done over the last decade in banking.'' We see now how that turned out. It will be a huge mess.

I don't think McCain understands insurance or insurance regulation. This is just false: ``Health insurance is simply a financial device that shifts around the apparent costs of the nation's overall health care bill among various payers.'' Above all, insurance is a mechanism for managing risk. It also provides for economy of scale too but the primary function is to reduce the risk to an individual or family of catastrophic heath care costs. It is a very serious problem and McCain's proposal ignores it. No other developed nation treats its citizens this way, forcing them to bear the risk of catastrophic heath care costs.

--McCain's "plan" does not keep pace with rising health care costs.

[T]he costs are escalating faster than overall price inflation, so unless the tax credits are indexed to heath care costs, the advantage will disappear in a few years. While this aspect looks good now (for those who have and can continue with employer coverage), that may change without indexing. The proposal says nothing about indexing.

In the post, Cox also outlines the tax properties of the McCain's "plan" and how it would turn a currently-covered person's benefits into taxable income that could eat away at the $5,000 credit that the proposal offers.

Aside from the fact that McCain probably could not get such an abomination passed in a Democratic Congress, this plan shows that McCain is going provide the exact kind of "leadership" that's making citizens wonder about their financial futures right now!

By, essentially, lifting regulations on insurance companies (something their lobbyists tried to get passed with the Bailout Bill) and employers, in general, McCain will strip away the last vestiges of protection that consumers have in dealing with the health care industry, their insurance companies, and their individual employers.

This is the sort of information we need to hear, because it will eventually affect every single one of us. Take the time and read the whole post here. It's not very long and it's a lot more informative, and certainly more important, than the mudslinging that the McCain/Palin ticket is engaging at this very moment.

And, if you think this is just one side of the story, take a look at this article from the National Journal by Ronald Brownstein, in which, while he sends no love to Obama's plan, the writer acknowledges that McCain's plan completely upends the entire health care and insurance system in a fundamental and damaging way.