McSame on how to lower the cost of health care...

[lsanderson]

Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Shamelessly Stolen from Krugman

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Can you hear my jaw dropping from here?

When did he say this? Certainly not this week; great ghu, please not this week!

[yarram.livejournal.com]

Following the link indicates this was in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Contingencies (http://www.contingencies.org), so it was probably written before the excrement passed through the oscillating air-circulation device and into the USA's financial systems.. But the timing is... *digs around for a tactful word*... inopportune, at best...

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes, I just followed the link and read the whole article.

The timing is remarkably opportune...for the opposition.

I've been working with employee benefit plans for the 20+ years. I've seen what's happened since insurance companies moved in and took control when costs started rising dramatically and the medical profession wasn't doing enough fast enough to manage the rising costs. To be frank, the medical profession didn't have a lot of incentive to control costs in the 1980s. Just like the Realtors and mortgage companies didn't have a lot of incentive to be careful in their lending practices in the past decade -- the incentives fueled risk rather than caution. It's where there was money to be made.

John McCain's health care plan scares me as much or more as his statements on war and the economy do. He claims his plan will make things better, that it will bring much needed health care reform to this country. But the plan he outlines would merely accelerate the madness in the broken system we already have, diverting more and more of the dollars that should be spent on medical treatment into administrative and insurance overhead costs instead and encouraging more and more providers and insurers to dump patients who pull down their results ratings.

It's very telling that McCain thinks that health care needs to follow the path that banks have taken...the path that gave us Resolution Trust, the path that led the U.S. government to promise hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts this week alone, all in the hope of saving the economy from utter destruction, perhaps in the next few weeks.

Okay, yes, I know, I'm preaching to the choir here. We all know there aren't any magic pills that will make everything all better. The reality is that health care reform is an enormous challenge, and one that has only gotten worse as we've struggled to address it for years. I just wish that politicians everywhere, especially those in the Republican party, would stop with the empty promises. The empty promises and the nightmare scenarios that they claim will fix everything.

Si

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

But quite unlikely.

Via Digby: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/deregulator-by-dday-nobodys-buying-this.html

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Wow, I must be drunk. It took the second read before the shakes started.

[ginahelen.livejournal.com]

:icon love:

[ginahelen.livejournal.com]

That is the most ridiculous statement I think I've ever read. Whoever said that is utterly fucking insane.