This is more of a "roadmap" diary. I hope that by placing this information up on the "old tubes" that readers with more knowledge and experience on this issue will delve into it and find the "devil in the details". Here is the story so far, The New Republic's story "McCain's (Not) Secret Plan to Deregulate Health Insurance" reports that:
John McCain’s campaign is crying foul this weekend, over an alleged misrepresentation of their man’s position on health care.
At issue is a statement, first publicized by Paul Krugman on Friday, in which McCain suggests that streamlining the regulation of health insurance might lead to "more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking." Liberal bloggers jumped all over it and, on Sunday, Barack Obama did too: "That’s right," Obama told a North Carolina audience, "John McCain says he wants to do for health care what Washington has done for banking."
The WashingtonPost reports that Sen. Obama's campaign responded to John McCain's healthcare plan once it became public this way:
Obama, appearing at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., mocked his rival for sounding out of touch at a time when Washington is moving rapidly to re-regulate the financial industry to curb the excesses that put the system into near-paralysis in the past week.
"So let me get this straight -- he wants to run health care like they've been running Wall Street," Obama told the audience. "Well, Senator, I know some folks on Main Street who aren't going to think that's such a good idea."
Now this being a campaign, the spin-meisters over at John McCain, repsonded with the typical double speak you can expect from that camp.
But McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin says that's bogus. He says that his boss’s statement, which appeared in an actuarial magazine, was referring specifically to a proposal that would allow cross-state purchasing of health insurance. This would allow somebody in, say, New Jersey to buy coverage sold from a state like Utah.
There is one problem for Mr. Holz-Eakin I happen to have a link to this obscure actuarial magazine, so we can test his assurtion (maybe if they know how to use the internet they would try this stunt. What McCain wrote on Wall St. style healthcare deregulation in contingencies magazine
According to Holtz-Eakin, it’s no different from what the government did for banks years ago, making possible the widespread use of automatic teller machines (ATMs). In other words, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with today’s meltdown on Wall Street--and Obama should know better.
Well read the story of Janice Ramsey as told by Jonathan Cohn in the book SICK.
Desperate for insurance, Ramsey happily signed on and paid her premiums ($365 a month). But then, a few months later, bill collectors started calling: Her insurer hadn’t been paying her bills and she owed several thousand dollars in charges. After making no headway with the carrier itself, Ramsey decided to call the state authorities--only to learn that she’d been taken in by a fraudulent carrier, never licensed to operate in the state and unable to pay its bills.
And she wasn’t alone. It turned out she was one of thousands of people around the country caught up in similar scams, all of them preying upon people in Ramsey's position--individuals who, because of pre-existing conditions, couldn’t find affordable coverage on her own.
Ramsey ended up owing $20,000--money she ended up having to pay off, on her own, while spending nearly two years without health insurance.
This is conected to John McCain's plan in the following manner. If John McCain's plan became law, and cross-state purchasing of individual insurance became legal, the story of Janice Ramsey would become the new norm. As Georgetown's Karen Pollitz, one of the leading public policy experts on the individual insurance market noted:
...consumers in California (population 36 million) who bought a policy licensed in Delaware (population 840,000) would not be protected by California law. Instead, California consumers with insurance problems would have to seek assistance from a regulator some 3,000 miles away and staffed to regulate insurance markets on a much smaller population scale.
I think all healtcare police experts here on the web should disect this article and find more juicie tid bits in it. Once again the full article signed under John McCain's name is:
What McCain wrote on Wall St. style healthcare deregulation in contingencies magazine.