I noticed a weird exchange in the comments yesterday. It was said that if John McCain were to be elected, there would be more "homeless, hopeless, and ill people." El Viajero responded, somewhat predictably, by asking, "Exactly what does she think McCain will do in office that will jump the numbers from where they are now?" I'm going to leave hopelessness aside, as I try not to comment on the spiritual dimensions of presidencies. But it's almost inarguable that a McCain presidency will push policies leading to an increase in illness and homelessness. Last year, McCain voted against expanding S-CHIP, which would have extended pubic health insurance to millions of currently uninsured children. Many of those children will become sicker than they would have if they'd been able to access a doctor early in their illness. Some may well die. In 1995, McCain voted for a GOP plan to balance the budget by cutting Medicaid by $182 billion over 10 years. Many adults would have been tossed off the rolls, been incapable of accessing a doctor, and fallen ill, or even died as unchecked hypertension led to cardiac arrest or a small lump grew into a full-body cancer. You can find similar examples of McCain trying to chop apart the safety net in almost every year of voting since. As for homelessness, though there's a chance that McCain might donate some of his 4/7/12 homes to house those lacking shelter, it's rather unlikely. And he's going to need to pay for his tax cuts somehow. As per usual, that money will come out of grants to states, and discretionary funding for public programs. There will be less money for housing programs so there's more money for the top 0.1 percent to purchase yachts. And down the income ladder just a bit, McCain's inadequate solutions to the housing crisis, and his insistence on punishing "irresponsibility" on the part of individual borrowers, won't do much to forestall foreclosures. There's a tendency to want to sugarcoat the outcomes of elections. You can say you disagree with McCain's policies because universal health care is important and humane and social programs are just and decent and upper-crust tax cuts are regressive and shameful and he's on the other side of all those opinions. What you're not supposed to say is that if John McCain is elected, the policies he has signaled he will pursue will harm the country's health, defund its safety net, lead to untreated illnesses, reduce mitigation of the ravages of poverty, and, in many cases, the outcome will be sickness and death and homelessness and, for those cut off from health coverage and help, probably hopelessness, too. McCain, for his part, would argue that even so, tax cuts are a matter of fairness and it's more important that health insurance is primarily private than that health insurance is actually accessible. And fair enough. But no reason we should ignore the implications of that philosophy.
