I recognize that the election has gotten a bit nasty of late and there are lots of harsh words flying around but there's really no reason to do something uncivil and damning like examining John McCain's policy proposals. Joe Klein should be ashamed of himself. Joe's taking a look at McCain's health insurance place and focusing on the fact that it exposes employer health care benefits to taxation. This is a tremendous tax increase, to the tune of $3.6 trillion over 10 years. But you won't pay most of it. Rather, as it becomes less affordable for employers to pay for health care, they'll stop doing it. Put another way: You're not going to pay higher taxes, you're going to lose your health care coverage. Then you'll be in the individual market where McCain will give you a fixed tax credit -- $5,000 for a family, or about 40 percent the cost of the average plan -- to purchase care. There's a whole theory behind this approach. McCain wants to cut total health care spending. Along with his advisers, he thinks total health care spending is too high because employers by lavish plans and employees don't realize those plans are coming out of their paychecks. If the employees were buying the plans, they'd buy cheapers ones, and use less health care. All these premises are probably true. And the outcome will be that people have less health care, and can't access needed services, and go bankrupt a lot. The bottom line is that this isn't merely a tax increase. It's a governance philosophy that holds that the problem with health insurance is that you have too much of it, and John McCain aims to change that. He has, in other words, a policy that will pay down the federal debt with money raised through human misery. Hey, here's a joke: What's the difference between a hockey mom under an Obama presidency and a hockey mom under a McCain presidency? Under a McCain presidency, there won't be hockey moms, because they can't afford to let their kids get hurt in a contact sport. Funny, right? Related: For more on McCain's health care plan, see this article.
