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Via Paul Krugman comes a great find. In the magazine Contingencies, published by the American Academy of Actuaries, John McCain has an article (pdf) on how he'd reform health care. It's...surprising:
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.If I had written a post saying John McCain wants to deregulate the health insurance industry and set off a race to the bottom that would end in absurdly complicated and deceptive insurance products and eventually causing collapse in the whole sector, I'd have been denounced as a hopeless partisan. But now John McCain is saying it! I await John McCain's inevitable denouncement of John McCain's biased and elitist attacks on John McCain's health reform plan. This, incidentally, is a pattern. Three years ago, John McCain wanted to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. One month ago, he wanted to make health insurance more like the banking industry. John McCain is a died-in-the-wool deregulator. He's not going to come out and endorse the financial crisis, but if you press the rewind button for just a moment, and freeze frame right before the collapse, McCain was trying to give Wall Street more responsibility over pensions and paint the basket of deregulatory policies that led to the meltdown as a model for other industries. It's why his response to the financial crisis has been so tinny and confused: The collapse is directly disproving McCain's view of the world, and no man can replace a long-held ideology in a matter of weeks.
