Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I read that Arizona's angry old man, John McCain, still embittered by his humiliating landslide defeat to Barack Obama in 2008, has decided to introduce a bill to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his own set of reforms (well, not really his reforms but a companion bill to Rep. Tom Price's bill in the House.) McCain Introduces Obamacare Repeal And Replacement Legislation.
I was going to do a post on McCain's latest cry for attention from his media villager base, but Jed Lewison at Daily Kos has already said everything i could say. President McCain reveals his Obamacare replacement plan:
President Senator John McCain has unveiled his plan for replacing Obamacare ... and its centerpiece is the very same plan he ran on and lost with in 2008.
Aside from repealing Obamacare, the centerpieces of McCain's plan would be (a) to replace current tax deductions for employer-provided health insurance with a one-size-fits-all health care tax credit of $5,000 for families and $2,500 for individuals and (b) to allow Americans to purchase insurance from any state in the country, whether or not they live in that state. McCain would also provide subsidies to states to cover people who can't otherwise get coverage.
On paper, McCain's plan sounds simple, but even if Obamacare had never become law, it would actually represent far more radical and abrupt change in the health insurance market than Obamacare. In theory, it makes sense to move away from employer-provided insurance plans, but McCain's plan would blow the model up overnight with unpredictable results. Obamacare, by contrast, envisions a future in which companies of increasingly large size can choose to purchase insurance through exchanges, an approach that will gradually lead to insurance portability without shocking the system McCain style.
McCain would also do away with Obamacare innovations like requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions, limiting their ability to charge people more simply for being older or female, and requiring minimal standards of coverage. Moreover, by encouraging people to buy insurance across state lines, McCain would create confusing regulatory environment in which a person in California might buy a policy regulated in Delaware. It's not hard to see how that could easily lead to a race to the bottom, especially as insurers decided to stop offering coverage regulated by state insurance commissioners who put consumers first.
All that being said, McCain deserves some credit for putting forward a plan, because by doing so, he's offering a concrete reminder not just of how Obamacare is better than the way things were, but also of how much worse things would be if Republicans got their way.
. . . Or if John McCain had been elected president in 2008. It's always a helpful reminder how strongly the American people rejected John McCain and his agenda in favor of Barack Obama:
Obama 69,498,516 popular vote 52.9% 365 Electoral Votes
McCain 59,948,323 popular vote 45.7% 173 Electoral Votes
If it wasn't for his media villager base, John McCain would already be forgotten history.
Lets see all John McCain's ideas were out of touch and out dated. He offered us NOCARE for his healthcare plan. McCain wanted to give the extreme wealthy and large corporations even those who ship their jobs overseas huge tax cuts and of course numerous worldwide wars, bombings, invasions, nuclear wars, killings and senseless bloodshed. All this he wanted paid for on the backs of the weak, sick, disadvantage, elderly, veterans, women, poor, working poor and middle class. NO JOHN MCCAIN the American people soundly reject you as being unqualified, too old, out of touch, and too much of a war loving, war thirty, warmonger! Who has a total disregard for human life. Most Americans would like to see you retire, you're just too "danged" old and senile to understand. You're not a military or foreign affairs expert you're just a hateful old bitter frustrated poor loser
Posted by: tomj | December 21, 2013 at 12:11 PM