McCain's Health Insurance Stupidity

McCain says that he’s going to give every family $5000 so they can “choose their own doctor”. The $5000 he’s giving each family is in the form of a tax credit.

Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

Except that this is $5000 that can be used solely for the purpose of transferring it to health insurance corporations.

Not so awesome, huh?

From the US Census, there are

Let’s do some research. (“What is this research of which you speak?” ask the dogmatic out there) There are 308 million people.

The US Census Data says that there are 111,617,402 households in the U.S. Of those, 66.8% are family households.

That gives about 75M households. The remainder of households, about 37M, have at least one person in each which gets $2500 in “health insurance tax credits”.

Given that there are an average of 2.61 people per family, that accounts for 196M people. From 308M that leaves 112M individuals

Each family, about 75M gets $5000. That’s $375B (yes, BILLION). 117M people gets $2500 each. That’s $35B (yes, BILLION)

For a total of $410,000,000,000.

The cost of the “war” in Iraq? $555,000,000,000

For all the staggering going on about how we’re going to pay for all that death and destruction, up comes McCain’s plan. Added together, these things will cost us nearly one TRILLION dollars.

But back to McCain’s attempt to improve our lives.

McCain and his small-government ethics adds that $410,000,000 to our debt.

But he’s giving money to us to help us!

Is he? Really? What are the restrictions on that money he’s giving us? Oh yeah, ALL OF THAT 410 BILLION DOLLARS CAN ONLY GO TO GIANT HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES, WHICH ARE FOR-PROFIT.

Isn’t that nice? He’s going to spend $410,000,000 so that he can give us our own money back. But wait! He’s not giving us our money back, he’s going to take our money (more on that in a bit), ride it through the bureaucratic morass and give it back to us—after months riding on a float—and demands we give it to health insurance corporations.

Fun!

But about taking our money: yes, he’s taking our money and not the money of corporations, because…wait for it…he’s planning on tax cuts for corporations!

If he were really serious about health care, he’d regulate health insurance. Everyone deserves health care, which makes it more like a utility than anything else. Why do they regulate utilities? Oh yeah, so they can’t rape us with high prices, like Texas raped California back when we had an energy crisis.

Why doesn’t he simply force the health insurance companies to subtract a percentage of that “tax cut” directly from their price scheduling?

And why the hell are insurance companies making profits anyway?