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McCain: Deregulate health insurance, like banking
Sat, 20 Sep 2008
Don McCanne's "Quote of the day" mailing list
Contingencies
September/October 2008
Better Care at Lower Cost for Every American
By John McCain
We can no longer afford to promise more than we can deliver. Nor can
we risk misdiagnosing the problem and devising a cure that might harm
the patient.
The problem is not that most Americans lack adequate health insurance.
The vast majority of Americans have private insurance, and our
government spends billions each year to provide even more.
Fundamental health care reform must begin with restoring control to
individuals and their families as health care consumers and patients
and making them the central focus of our health care system.
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide
competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would
provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst
excesses of state-based regulation.
http://www.contingencies.org/
Comment: Let there be no doubt about John McCain's plans for health
care in America: Just as reducing the burden of government regulation
of real estate lending has allowed more individuals to achieve the
American dream of owning their own homes, reducing regulatory
oversight of private insurers will make health care more affordable
for all of us.
Many people made a lot of money in home loans while the regulators
turned their backs. Of course, those people have walked away with
their siphoned-off money in hand, and left us with a market that has
destroyed the finances of individuals and shattered their dreams of
home ownership. The magnitude of the crisis is so great that the
government had to step in and use our tax dollars to prevent the
collapse of the economy.
John McCain now wants the regulators to turn their backs on the
private insurance industry. By selling us insurance products that are
affordable, many people will make a lot of money. When those
underinsurance products fail to protect us from financial hardship
whenever we need heath care, our personal finances will collapse, and
the financing of the health care industry will be disrupted, resulting
in the impending collapse of the health care delivery system. By then,
those who profited will have walked away with their siphoned-off money
in hand, leaving us with a health care crisis that only the government
will be able to repair, using our tax dollars to prevent the collapse
of our health care system.
Just as a robust deregulated market in sub-prime lending and
mortgage-backed securities was not the solution to expand home
ownership to more Americans, a robust deregulated market in private
health underinsurance plans can never make health care affordable for
those who need it.
Barack Obama understands that if private insurance plans are to
fulfill their function of making health care affordable, then the
market must be tightly regulated, and underinsurance products must be
prohibited. He also understands that private plans that actually work
are no longer affordable for the majority of Americans. That is why he
decided against mandating universal health care coverage; you can't
buy a plan if you don't have the money to pay for it.
Neither a market of deregulated private plans nor a market of
tightly-regulated private plans will work. Continuing to rely on the
private insurance market will compound the crisis in health care
financing, eventually forcing a government buyout of the system.
Instead of waiting for more pain, suffering, financial hardship, and
even death, let's adopt a system that actually would make health care
affordable for all of us: a single payer national health program.
Isn't prevention better than a salvage operation?
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