Via Bob Herbert, who discusses study that will be published Tuesday in the web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.
Herbert lays out what those of us who are covered under employer-based health insurance can expect if he's elected, and it ain't pretty.
Being a member of a large school system, I can rely on the power of the people when it comes to having some leverage with my insurer (which is needed constantly). For my husband's last invoice, they attempted to pay 5 cents toward a $158 bill for a general checkup. It took awhile, but calls to my benefits coordinator helped get a little extra money from the cheapskates.
Not any more:
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."
I knew that McCain wanted to treat employer based health benefits as income, and even offers a refundable tax credit. But Herbert lays out what a real disaster this would be.
Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.
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 rest more control over our health care system to the patients themselves."
Right, let the markets decide - and just look what happened with the financial system.