Friday, April 04, 2008

He's such a maverick

that he would be ineligible for health insurance under his own healthcare plan. John McCain, that is. Paul Krugman notes the silence of McCain's "plan" (which is, as Krugman says, a list of bullet points) on people with pre-existing conditions who get denied private insurance coverage. McCain, as a skin cancer survivor would be one such person. Except that as an old person, he could always go into Medicare. Which is a government program that he presumably opposes.

But perhaps the Maverick deserves some credit. He has shown his opposition to Medicare (and Medicaid, the government program for low income people) by proposing to bankrupt it. On January 5, 2008, McCain told a questioner at a townhall meeting in Peterborough New Hampshire that he would dump people with pre-existing conditions into a Medicare/Medicaid trust fund.

As the Boston Globe noted recently, similar answers that he has offered before have left experts confused. Anyway, the result would be to ruin the programs financially, since they'd get all the people likely to have the highest costs. So he could abolish the programs that way.

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