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OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this. Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:
"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."
So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!
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I wonder if he even knows he said it. My guess is that some Republican shill wrote it for him in a fit of Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan Conservative rapture. Ever since F.D.R. saved America from itself, the Conservatives have warned against "creeping socialism" which they equated with Global Communism, which they imply every time that they say the word "Liberal." In the process, they’ve ignored common sense and the ubiquity of human greed. But this particular Gaffe has a double irony. The business-ification of Medicine which crept into things during the Reagan Era is part of the problem in Medical "Care" today, not part of the solution. As a physician who has watched what’s happened to medicine in my lifetime, McCain’s pronouncements in this article were absurd before last week, Now it’s a "double" – ridiculous on all counts…
My first thought was, “Unbelievable!” and then I caught myself and though “No, par for the course and completely typical.”
Healthcare to truly reach all of the people cannot operate as a cutthroat industry focused on the bottom line. It needs regulation because health care doesn’t deal in widgets. It deals in people’s well being and lives.
Go Obama! Down w/ tyranny and corporate greed.
Did you see where Obama cited this article in one of his speeches as why folks in Florida (and everywhere) shouldn’t trust McCain? He’s a smart guy.
He is a smart guy!
see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/amandascott/gGg9zj