Here's John McCain's last big idea.
Hey! Sarah...
Which God would that be?
The God of Deuteronomy? Deuteronomy 21:18-21
The God of Numbers? http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers%2031&version=NIV
The God of Leviticus? http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=leviticus%2026:%2014-46&version=NIV
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Alan: Most Americans without healthcare -- and there are tens of millions of them -- either need Medicaid (whose expansion Republicans oppose like voluntary bedbug infestation), or they need cash-value subsidies to make health insurance affordable. They do not need "tax deductions" which are of NO worth to 47% of Americans who pay no federal tax at all. You can't buy "squat" with a tax deduction when there's nothing to deduct from. The inability of Republicans to understand this axiomatic truth is a precise measure of the abyss that separates Republican "theory" from ANYTHING that would prove helpful to people in need. Tax deductions for people who do not pay taxes in the first place is like offering free fresh bait to Sahara nomads.
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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.
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