Last night I said on the radio (you all listened, right?) that Joe Biden's answer about John McCain's health care plan should be an ad. Today, it's an ad:
"The McCain Health Tax" is a good name for it. It's a $3.6 trillion dollar tax, by the McCain campaign's own estimates. And the goal of it is to eliminate the employer-based health benefit system, to tax it so much that employers won't want to provide it anymore.
Now, some might say that is something we ought to do. But it's replaced with the wilds of the individual health insurance market. Which is prohibitively more expensive than the $5,000 refundable tax credit McCain's going to offer. Businesses pay less for health care because they pool their employees for a better bargaining position. McCain's plan is the insurance industry's version of union-busting.
McCain's philosophy on health care is that Americans have too much of it, and if they only knew the costs, they would purchase less. So, 47 million luckie-duckies without health insurance, and the other 40 million who are underinsured, take note - John McCain wants you to be more frugal. Comparison shop for that leg surgery. Maybe find a discount MRI. (Not that McCain's ever done this - he's been on government-run health care his entire life and hasn't complained too much about it.)
Until now, I don't think it's been clear how truly radical McCain's health care plan really is. Bush just ignored the problem. McCain wants to actively make it worse.