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The Des Moines Register asked John McCain how a guy who's been on government health care his whole life could be so certain of the virtues of the private health insurance markets. His angry answer is worth reprinting:
"You know that's an interesting statement, isn't it? And I have never been an astronaut, but I think I know the challenges of space. And I have never done a lot of things in my life that I think I am familiar with. I've always been a free enterprise person who thinks that families make the best decisions for themselves and their future...so the answer is that most of my life, in serving my country I have had health care. I did go a period of time where the health care wasn't very good."Huh? John McCain almost certainly doesn't know the challenges of space, and it's frankly weird that he replied to a health care question by insisting that he totally could have been an astronaut. And why did it take him so long to get to the "POW!"? Anyway.McCain's main argument on health care is that we can't let the government into it. In this, his experience would actually lend him an enormous advantage: Who better to relay the inadequacy of government provided health care than a guy who has spent his whole life within its confines? But as a 72-year-old who's healthy enough to run for president, there's no evidence that McCain has ever experienced a day of dissatisfaction with his health care coverage. Indeed, as the husband of an heiress, McCain could easily have stepped out onto the private market -- the very market he wants all Americans to use -- and bought another plan for him and his wife, so he wouldn't have to deal with the government system any longer. There's no evidence he did that, either. McCain's problem is not simply that he's been on government health insurance his whole life. It's that, by all accounts and appearance, he's been quite satisfied with his coverage. His complaints are all of a general nature. "I've always been a free enterprise person" or "my opponent wants to create a health care bureaucracy." Never "I've been on Medicare for years now, and it's a house of horrors." Meanwhile, his rhetoric on the private system demonstrates how poor his understanding of the issue really is. He "thinks that families make the best decisions for themselves and their future," so he wants to put them into a system where they can choose the right coverage plan for their family, and insurers can simply refuse to sell it to them? It's not exactly a logical progression. Meanwhile, Obama's plan gives families a broad choice of insurance options, bars insurers from refusing them coverage, and subsidizes low income families so they can afford a comprehensive plan. So tell me again about which candidate supports a family's "choice."
