McCain / Palin plan to end health insurance for all

The New York Times has an editorial by Bob Herbert that outlines the implications of the McCain / Palin healthcare insurance plan. Not to put too fine a point on it, this will be the impact:

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

Got that? 20 million more uninsured. And as an added bonus, it'll cost us more!

For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.

According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”

The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”

And what will the net effect of this be on the insured?

When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.

That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.

The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”

This isn't getting the press it deserves. This plan is a radical change to the way we currently do health insurance in this company but is a clasic case of "doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing at all."

This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans’ ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

McCain / Palin. Wrong on Healthcare. Wrong for America.