Health Care in the New Economy

I know we've been a little distracted by pigs and pitbulls and lipstick, oh and then the entire economy tanking, so you might have good reason to not have read the details of McCain's health care plan. Basically, he wants less insurance to come through employers and more people to buy their own, funded in part by a new payroll tax to "help you pay for it."

If the thought of having to shop for your own insurance plan, weigh the pros and cons of each and figure out what you can actually afford sounds like fun to you, you might want to consider some of these fun facts:

"For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on...

According to a study, just released [from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan] '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 whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

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."

And the reading just gets more fun from there...