The McCain Health Plan: Millions Lose Coverage, Health Costs Worsen, and
Insurance and Drug Industries Win

By Roger Hickey

Today Arizona Sen. John McCain will deliver what his handlers are hyping as
a major address on health care. McCain’s plan is a dangerous fraud.

He wants voters to think he is going after health care cost inflation. In
reality, he wants to dismantle the employer-provided system that now covers
over 60 percent (or about 158 million) of non-elderly Americans, forcing
millions of us who now get fairly decent health insurance on the job to instead
buy whatever they can find on the individual market controlled by unregulated
and predatory insurance companies. And he would drive health care costs upward,
not downward.

This is truly amazing: McCain and his handlers knew they had to say
something about health care. So they turned to their friends (and financial
supporters) in the health care industry and the conservative think tanks. And
they have adopted the most extreme right-wing ideological approach, premised on
the idea that the big problem in health care is that Americans have too much
insurance – in their words, we don’t have enough “skin in the game” – and that
only when we have to buy health care with money that comes directly out of our
own pockets will consumers force doctors, hospitals and insurance companies to
become more efficient.