Honorable Sir: I am a corrupt foreign politician who has embezzled millions of dollars from my country. I have learned of your upright character and exceptional honesty. Help me laundry my money and I will give you half for your kindness. Just email me your social security and bank account numbers and PINs, and I will put the money in your accounts. When I am safe from the law, I will contact you and you send me half the money I deposited. You could keep all the money, but I know you are a fair person. Respectfully yours, There’s One Born Every Minute.
If you were in the least bit tempted to respond to this offer, then you’ll love John McCain’s approach to health care reform, because every good confidence game starts not with your confidence in the con artist but with the con artist’s confidence in you. And John McCain has great confidence in you, the extraordinary, hard working American citizen, who can carry this great nation on your back if only the parasitic government would get out of your way and out of your pocketbook.
On the other hand, if you value your money and your life, you’ll read on to see why the McCain-Palin health care confidence game may be dangerous to your financial and your physical health.
I just returned from a three-day National Congress on Health Reform in Washington D.C. The conference ended with presentations and critiques of the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin health reform plans by representatives of the two campaigns. In response to a question about how much health insurance McCain’s proposed $5,000 tax credit would buy for a family, the McCain representative said that this credit was slightly more than the average current contribution employers make to employee health insurance. But a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation http://content.healthaffairs.org/... found that in 2008, the average annual cost of family health insurance was $12,680, of which employees paid $3,354 out-of-pocket and employers paid the rest. Under the McCain-Palin plan, the $9,336 per family paid by employers would no longer be tax deductible. Therefore, the federal government would recover at least a portion of the new tax credit. With no tax incentive, employers may continue to assume some or all of their current outlay for employee health insurance, or they may choose to stop underwriting employee health insurance altogether. If they pay less for employee health insurance, they may pass their savings along to their workers as salary increases, or they may keep some or all of their savings. Because the primary purpose of the McCain-Palin plan is to reduce the cost of health care, your tax credit will be adjusted, according to McCain’s representative, by less than the rate of medical inflation but more than the rate of general inflation.
How will this affect me? I don’t know and frankly, I don’t particularly care because I own my business and am independently wealthy. How will this affect Senator McCain? I don’t know, but I doubt if he and his multimillionaire wife will lose much sleep over these changes. How will this affect you? I don’t know that either, but if you are a hard-working American who is not wealthy or a member of Congress, I imagine it might make a big difference in your life. But Senator McCain knows that as a red-blooded American, you will make good use of your $5,000 tax credit and will see to it that those large health insurance companies straighten up and fly right.
It is unfortunate that Senator McCain likes to use words whose meaning he does not fully understand. He mistakes tactical maneuvers for strategic initiatives, and transactions between uninformed, relatively powerless buyers and profit-hungry powerful corporations as examples of a free market in action. Accurate information is essential to a healthy free market, as the purchasers of sub-prime derivatives have learned, much to the regret of poor, beleaguered American taxpayers. Similarly, the current non-group health insurance market is a poster child for how asymmetrical power between individual buyers and corporate insurers results in over-priced, severely-restricted coverage for healthy people and little or no affordable coverage for people with preexisting conditions. But have no fear. With typical American ingenuity, you will find a way to determine what your future health care needs will be and will band together with other similarly advantaged purchasers to create a competitive market for health insurance. If you succeed, you will have portable health insurance tailored to your needs at a price you have negotiated without any heavy-handed interference from government bureaucrats and regulators. If you fail, you will have proven that you are an unworthy of a place among the winners in our market economy and will suffer the consequences, unless, of course, you are well-connected enough to be entitled to a free-market taxpayer-funded government bailout.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Obama recognizes that corporate power must be restricted to preserve the competition required to sustain a truly free market and that government must ensure that adequate, accurate information is available both to buyers and to sellers. Competition in the private sector may be the most effective and efficient way to support innovation, balance supply and demand, and establish fair prices, but government competition with the private sector sometimes is essential to maintain consumer choice and ensure that vital services always are available and affordable.
Despite attempts to label Senator Obama as a radical extremist, Obama’s approach to health care reform is evolutionary. Great care has been taken to preserve the things that work and to restructure or replace only those things that have not served us well. I have little difficulty imagining how I and my associates might be affected by the reforms Senator Obama is proposing. On the other hand, in spite of my education and experience as a successful physician and entrepreneur who has purchased health insurance for me and my employees, and in spite of Senator McCain’s great confidence in my free market acumen, I remain uncertain how I or my associates will be affected by Senator McCain’s radical health care reform proposals.