McCain is lying about the Democrats' health care proposals, regrettably

The NYT highlights yet more lies emanating from the mendacious 71 year old John McCain, this time about the health care reform proposals of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. McCain often states or implies that Obama and Clinton are advocating for a single-payer system or a nationalized health care system such as are common in Europe. Regrettably, they are doing no such thing.

The suggestion is incorrect. While both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are calling for universal health care and an expanded role for government, they stop well short of calling for a single-payer plan.

Mr. McCain has made the assertion several times in recent days, even as he and the Republicans have made repeated calls for accuracy on the campaign trail.

McCain has really been laying it on thick this week, "using language that evokes the specter of socialized medicine" as the Times puts it.

"There are those that want a massive government takeover of the health care system in America," Mr. McCain warned Thursday in Des Moines, as he made the case for his more market-based approach...

"But before you decide to sign on to that kind of a program, go to Canada, or go to European countries that have government-run health care systems," he continued. "My friends, they don’t work, they’re inefficient, and they end up in a two-tiered system where the wealthiest can afford to pay for their own health care and those with low income sometimes wait six or eight months for a routine kind of treatment. And that’s what I’m not going to let happen to the United States of America."

As a matter of fact, and unlike McCain, I have lived in Britain. I found the health care system there to be much better and more rational than the crazy health-care mess that Americans tolerate.

In any case, that has to be some of the most laughable fear-mongering that any Republican candidate has engaged in. A two-tier health-care system in which the rich get better coverage than the poor? Horrors! How could such an unfair imbalance ever be allowed to arise in the USA, a nation with no more than about 50 million uninsured, give or take a few million poor children? Never mind having to wait "sometimes" for months for "routine" (i.e. non-emergency) medical procedures, the uninsured in America tend to get no health care whatever, unless that is the government picks up the tab (to the tune of $45 billion per year).

If I were to editorialize, I'd want to make two points here: (1) John McCain is not my friend; (2) McCain's demagoguery on the health care crisis reveals what a hollow, shrivelled soul he has.

Instead, I'll leave the editorializing to the Des Moines Register, which had a rather pointed reaction to the latest health care proposal being flogged by McCain himself. The Senator, who gets his own health coverage through Congress, wants to encourage businesses to stop providing employees with health coverage. You'd have thought that American businesses don't need any further encouragement to leave their employees without health care. But McCain's goal, as ridiculous as it seems, is to force individuals to negotiate their own health insurance deals. He proposes to do that by eliminating business tax breaks for medical coverage, and giving tax breaks to individuals who buy their own coverage.

It's fair to say that Senator McCain's swing through Iowa this week left the Des Moines paper's editors just a tad underwhelmed.

The proposal [by McCain] should scare the heck out of the millions of Americans who rely on employer-based coverage...Buying individual policies means having your health history reviewed. It means not having the bargaining power and protections that come with being part of a plan offered by an employer. And it's expensive...

The senator is correct that the employer-based system of health insurance in this country isn't working. Businesses are saddled with the high costs of coverage, putting them at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace. Insurance shouldn't be tied to jobs.

But the more reasonable solution is to offer everyone what Medicare already offers: health coverage financed by a combination of tax dollars and participant contributions, thus allowing the huge bargaining power of millions of Americans to leverage down costs.

That idea is nowhere near as radical as forcing millions of Americans to shop for their own coverage in a profit-driven, private-insurance sector.

Medicare for all. That doesn't seem like such a difficult concept to me, somehow or other. At times the rightward tilt of political debate in the US leaves me puzzled. If Americans think that universal health care is a "radical" idea, goodness gracious - how would they react to something truly radical like universal old-age pensions? Oh, wait, never mind...we already have those. They're called "Social Security".