McCain moves to middle on health care

[GaryC 7]

McCain moves to middle on health care

Mike Allen, Jonathan Martin

Tue Apr 29, 7:35 AM ET

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is proposing a greater federal commitment to people without health insurance on Tuesday, suggesting that it help funds states to set up non-profit risk pools to help Americans who are denied coverage or can't afford it.

McCain's health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.

"Cooperation among states in the purchase of insurance would … be a crucial step in ridding the market of both needless and costly regulations, and the dominance in the market of only a few insurance companies," McCain says in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday morning in Tampa, Fla.

McCain is announcing his "Guaranteed Access Plan" on the second day of a "Call To Action" health-care tour that will later take him to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and Colorado.

Until now, McCain has emphasized such conventional conservative measures as tax deductions and malpractice reform. His new stance moves him closer to where former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was during the primary, an approach McCain had criticized.

McCain is taking a step beyond tax incentives and tort reform, but not a leap. He is noncommittal in his remarks, pointing to the non-profit organizations as one effective approach that he would discuss with governors.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director who's now a senior policy adviser to McCain, said the announcement reflects the senator's "commitment to getting this problem solved" and "a world in which we deliver better care at lower cost."

"You don't have to do it with a mandate - he's not a mandate guy," Holtz-Eakin said. "He'd like to sit down with the governors and, rather than ram something down their throats, develop - with some discussion and consensus - a best-practice model for getting people coverage when they're expensive."

The board of the non-profit risk pools would include representatives of patients, hospitals, doctors and insurance companies. Insurers would then bid on the business. The reinsurance or high-risk pools he is proposing would be voluntary, and states would be able to combine them into bigger pools.

"If it turns out to be the case that one of the problems turns out to be not enough money, then [he'd] work with Congress to develop the funding in a sensible and responsible way," Holtz-Eakin said.

Other funding would come from a tax credit that McCain has proposed of $2,500 a year for individuals and $5,000 a year for families. The approach counts on savings from reduced hospital walk-ins by the uninsured, and from savings from Medicaid programs for low-income patients.

Unveiling his plan at the Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute at the University of South Florida, McCain is loose on specifics, saying he would "work with Congress, the governors, and industry to make sure that it is funded adequately and has the right incentives to reduce costs such as disease management, individual case management, and health and wellness programs."

Nevertheless, the announcement helps answer one of the biggest criticisms of McCain's plan, which relies largely on tax incentives and individual choice to alleviate a health-insurance crisis that has the two Democratic presidential candidates calling for substantial government intervention.

Critics contend that under new tax incentives McCain has proposed, the richest and healthiest employees would opt out of their current coverage, leaving employers covering the sickest workers - those with preexisting conditions -- and likely lead companies to stop offering coverage. Individuals with pre-existing conditions who no longer have access to coverage through the workplace would have difficulty finding affordable coverage. These new federally-funded high-risk pools are an effort to address that concern by making coverage more available to some of those who might not be able to find coverage on their own.

On chronic diseases, McCain plans to support giving the Food and Drug Administration the explicit power to regulate nicotine - an authority that the FDA now assumes but that tobacco companies have challenged in court, and points to the cost benefits of helping people quit smoking .

McCain's plan for risk pools does not specify exactly who would be eligible for the pooled coverage. "You could have a pool and have it just be for people who were denied, or … you could open it up to anyone who wanted to buy in that pool voluntarily, so small businesses could go in," Holtz-Eakin said. "You could get individuals if they wanted, and that would produce a more robust pool, clearly."

Already, 33 states have high-risk pools, with 190,361 enrollees at the end of last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. They have had mixed results, according to health policy experts.

Holtz-Eakin said of these experiments: "Not all of them are working very well, but some are."

In McCain's remarks, he continues to emphasize a free-market approach to health care, saying that "cooperation among states in the purchase of insurance would also be a crucial step in ridding the market of both needless and costly regulations, and the dominance in the market of only a few insurance companies."

"There are those who are convinced that the solution is to move closer to a nationalized health care system," he says. "They urge universal coverage, with all the tax increases, new mandates, and government regulation that come along with that idea. But in the end this will accomplish one thing only. We will replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly. … The key to real reform is to restore control over our health-care system to the patients themselves."

Holtz-Eakin said the health-policy experts who helped write McCain's plan include Stephen T. Parente, a health economist at the University of Minnesota; Thomas P. Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who is a former congressional health economist; Regina E. Herzlinger of Harvard Business School., whose biography notes that Money magazine dubbed her the "godmother" of consumer-driven health care; and Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-Tex.) an obstetrician-gynecologist and second-generation physician.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080429/...6qHIbk6GhtsnwcF

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McCain's health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.

McCain. Just another big government tax-and-spend librul

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

McCain's health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.

McCain. Just another big government tax-and-spend librul

Yes, he's looking to raise payroll taxes some 3.6 trillion dollars to pay for this.

[GaryC 7]

McCain's health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.

McCain. Just another big government tax-and-spend librul

Yes, he's looking to raise payroll taxes some 3.6 trillion dollars to pay for this.

And how much would a full blown UHC system cost in taxes? One hell of a lot more than that. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than the government taking the whole thing over will you? Hate to tell you this but even if Obama wins you will not get it.

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McCain just outed himself as a tax-and-spend-liberal. The conservative base will be furious.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

You're happy about this, Gary? I'm thoroughly confused.

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He has no problem with big government liberalism if it comes from McCain.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

He has no problem with big government liberalism if it comes from McCain.

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McCain - Surprisingly Liberal....

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John McCain: Liberal in Disguise

Outside martial matters, McCain sides with the American Left on most key issues.

...

First, regarding religion, McCain looms as no lover of Christians. Recall his comments about key religious leaders in 2000, calling them "agents of intolerance." And McCain's vitriolic vilification of Christians was not limited to a single occurrence, for he later said, "I must not and will not retract anything that I said in that speech at Virginia Beach. It was carefully crafted, it was carefully thought out." (Hardball, 3/1/00). More recently, however, McCain, positioning himself for 2008, has repackaged himself as pro-Christian, lauding key religious leaders and duping the devout.

Second, on the issue of gay marriage, in 2005 McCain opposed a federal gay-marriage ban (Los Angeles Times, 1/25/ and 3/8). Now, however, likely realizing that most Americans think otherwise, McCain says he supports a gay-marriage ban (Meet the Press, 4/2/06). Which is it?

Then, regarding abortion, McCain most certainly is pro-choice. In the San Francisco Chronicle (8/20/99) McCain sided with the pro-abortion camp, suggesting that overturning Roe v. Wade would lead to illegal abortions. Realizing, however, that he could not inveigle the GOP nomination with such views, McCain more recently has resold himself as pro-life, even saying he would support the South Dakota ban on abortions.

Furthermore, regarding campaign-finance reform, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act is perhaps one of the more left-wing acts of Congress in the past twenty years. As recently exposed by Brian C. Anderson, "The Plot to Shush Rush and O'Reilly" in City Journal, McCain-Feingold (which passed with overwhelming Democrat support) is a convenient contrivance to silence conservatives. As noted by a whole host of commentators (George Will, Jonathan Rauch, and even Justice Clarence Thomas), this act poses blatant restrictions on political speech. It especially affects AM Radio and political internet blogs -- the only two spheres of popular media where conservatives can truly compete.

Last, but not least, McCain's liberal tendencies show in the immigration debate. McCain has proven to be farther Left on the immigration issue than even many Liberals. At the very basis of most conservative thought is the idea of law and order, which are essential for the continuity of society. Bypassing tradition and sanity, and slapping in the face those who have come here legally, McCain has sought to sweep aside law and order to engage in the unbecoming business of pandering to ethnicities.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

He has no problem with big government liberalism if it comes from McCain.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

McCain's health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.

McCain. Just another big government tax-and-spend librul

Yes, he's looking to raise payroll taxes some 3.6 trillion dollars to pay for this.

And how much would a full blown UHC system cost in taxes? One hell of a lot more than that.

Actually, there's little evidence to support that and much to the contrary. After all, there isn't a government UHC which comes even close to the privately run system when it comes to cost and inefficiency. The private industry in the US has shown quite impressively that it isn't going to be outdone on the red tape by any government anywhere in the world.

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[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]