McCain's Three Strikes Against American Healthcare

Strike one, the curveball: Big government healthcare is the reason McCain is alive.

Palin disses big government healthcare programs. McCain is alive because of one at a time when 18,000 Americans die each year simply because they lack health insurance. Yes, he has health insurance to die for.

McCain has great insurance--as a United States Senator. The deadly melanoma on his face was overlooked by his family doctor during regular checkups. But the United States Senate has their own medical doctors, and it was a Senate doctor who discovered the cancer and saved McCain’s life. Big government healthcare is terrible--for all the rest of us but not for the McCains. Strike one.

Strike two, the slider: instead of ‘Do no harm,’ McCain’s plan hurts millions of Americans.

McCain’s healthcare proposal, instead of helping the 45+ million Americans without health insurance, would make matters worse. He goes from the Hippocratic Oath, “Do no harm” to the hypocrite oath, ‘do no harm to my pals but devil take the hindmost.’

McCain would tax employer-sponsored health benefits as taxable income. Under his tax and spend proposal, people would receive health tax credits of $2500 per person ($5000 per family) to purchase insurance. But the average family needs to spend over $12,500 per year on health insurance, and God help you if you have a pre-existing condition when you try to buy it because then you might not be able to buy health insurance at any price.

In his column “Health Care Destruction,” Paul Krugman writes, “Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.” Strike two.

Strike three, the high heat: Under McCain you would be on your own.

The US is the only industrial nation in the world which doesn’t have healthcare for all its citizens. Michael Moore, trying to understand why Americans can’t figure out how to get universal healthcare, finds that old Wall Street bugaboo, Greed! Or, as he expresses it, Americans will finally get the healthcare we all need when enough of us move from “me” to “we.”

John McCain is not the leader to do this. He wants us to stay in “me” mode. When I interviewed him in New Hampshire last year for Manchester Public Access Channel 23, I asked why his healthcare proposal was best. His response highlighted more “responsibility to the individual.”

So McCain’s answer to finding healthcare for the 45+ million Americans naked and vulnerable to a health crisis: put it on them. He reminds us that we are naked and vulnerable and better do something about it. But it’s our individual responsibilities. Senator Obama’s summary of this is dead on: McCain wants America to be, not an ownership society, but a “you are on your own” society -- nowhere more dangerously so than with McCain’s healthcare proposals and approach.

McCain’s ideology, the Republican mantra, is that the “market” will provide healthcare to Americans. Maybe not the healthcare they need (or want), but the “market” will give them what they deserve. McCain’s ideology blinds him to the fact that healthcare is not self-regulated by markets.

McCain has no idea how to answer this question: in what ‘market’ does supply determine demand? This is the reality of healthcare: supply determines demand. Doctors, the suppliers of healthcare, tell patients, the demanders of healthcare, what we need and what we will get. And it has to be so. If we did not trust doctors to tell us ‘what is wrong’ and what we needed to get healthy, we would not go to that doctor. Fundamental to the interaction of doctor and patient is the patient trusting the doctor to make these decisions. No wonder “the market” has failed to provide healthcare for tens of millions of Americans (and will not)--it doesn’t work in healthcare.

So when McCain (and Palin) start ranting about letting the “market” make sure that 45+ million Americans will somehow, some day, get the healthcare they need, they become a Keynesian, a least in one sense. (Talk about shock and awe!) Yes, they adopt the famous Keynes observation: ‘In the long run, we all are dead.’

What kind of health care plan is that? Strike three: You’re out!