Guaranteed Healthcare

The video you've just watched is an American tragedy.

A citizen of the richest country on the planet, evidently an immigrant from Spain, asking John McPalin why she was compelled to bring her ill relative, a "so-called uninsurable", home to Spain to die?

And McPalin's rambling, disjointed and utterly pathetic response.

The traditional media didn't see fit to make these chilling remarks public.  You should do yourself a favor and look at the man  shameless con artist who hopes he can lie and three card monte his way into becoming the 44th President of the United States.

But America's "so-called uninsurables" and how McPalin plans on dealing with us, is just the tip of his healthcare iceberg.

If Palin/McCain gets elected, they're going to throw millions of Americans into the private individual insurance market. Some estimates are that twenty million additional Americans will be on their own. They'll do as I do, they'll tremble as they write a check for junk insurance. They'll learn the first time they fall ill, that they'll be, as I am, at the mercy of a criminal industry, protected by a criminal government.

The individual insurance market, trust me, is not a place you want to be. When Barack Obama talks about being "on your own" if God forbid McPalin is elected, heed his words. Having individual insurance is the purest definition of Hell and being on-your-own in America.

This morning in the New York Times, Bob Herbert explained what  on your own will look like under President McPalin.

He likens the individual insurance market to the crucible. Now that's some powerful language. [Definition of crucible: A test of the most decisive kind; a severe trial; as, the crucible of affliction]

McCain’s Radical Agenda

Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?

These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.

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.

[emphasis added]

Twenty million Americans, just like me. Read a bit more from Bob Herbert.

“It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.

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.”

If you're not hurting enough lately with the collapse of the U.S. financial system, Bob Herbert makes the point that the same folks who brought us to our financial knees, plan to roll out upon election an even more unregulated healthcare system. Talk about cruelty!

The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

. . .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 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.

And this is the reason why McPalin wants to talk about flying pigs and lipstick but not the issues.