Here I am watching 20% of my retirement savings going down the toilet and John McCain tells me he will be doing me a favor over the next ten years by cutting $1.3 trillion from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets. $1.3 trillion. I'm on Medicare and I am not too happy about this. He needs to do this to pay for his health care plan. I'm all in favor of catastrophic health insurance but I don't want health insurance plans that are catastrophes, and that's what Dishonest John is offering me. He wants to give me a $2500 tax credit for health insurance that will cost me much more. Meanwhile my Medicare benefits will likely shrink. Thanks, but no thanks.
The McCain plan, at its most optimistic, is expected to increase the number of insured by 5 million. The Obama plan, which is more expensive ($1.6 trillion over ten years) is expected to insure 34 million more people. Allegedly McCain's plan "won't cost the government":
Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the plan is accurately described as budget neutral because it assumes enough savings in Medicare and Medicaid spending to make up the difference. He said the savings would come from eliminating Medicare fraud and by reforming payment policies to lower the overall cost of care. He said the new tax credits will help some low-income people avoid joining Medicaid. The campaign also proposes increasing Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors. (Wall Street Journal)
The savings by squeezing out fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid is supposed to be $1.3 trillion? Yeah, right. Like Saddam had WMDs and we'd be greeted as liberators. So my benefits won't go down? Yeah, right. Like the economy is fundamentally sound.
If change means making things even worse, then McCain is for change.
- Log in to post comments
I wish someone would notice that tax credits don't do anything for people who are not making enough to pay taxes.
I have no health insurance. I don't want a tax credit for insurance. I do not want to shop around for health insurance because I cannot legally find out in advance what I would be getting for my money, if anything at all. I want the law to apply to the insurance racket the same way it does to other businesses -- putting counterfeiters, fraudsters, and cheats in prison, rather than requiring me to be rich enough to beat a billion dollar corporation in court to make them pony up their end of the agreement.
I suspect that John McCain considers providing the poor or elderly with health care to be fraudulent in and of itself... I'm sure he would have no trouble at all in saving $1.3 trillion and more from the Medicare/Medicaid budgets!
Ya know, John, I just saw a campaign wheel roll by this bus. Ya Bet Ya John. Ya know, John, if we keep say'n this crap is true, they will believe it. Ya be ya John. As God made little gree apples.
Not only does he think we should "Shop around for health insurance," but he thinks that insurance companies should shop around for their favorite states. States with laws favorable to insurance companies at the expense of the consumer.
I like the free market. I don't like government-enabled monopolies, and that is what his plan would create. A state like Mississippi would look to states such as Delaware and South Dakota to see how laws favoring credit companies benefited those states economically.
I also talked to many senior citizens when Medicare Part D was introduced, as they tried to wade their way through hundreds of plans to try to decipher whether or not those plans would cover their meds, which meds were based on formularies. One I talked to had been at Pearl Harbor, and he took it personally that the government had so botched the plan. I would hate to see my next healh insurance plan cafeteria expand from the current eight choices, with the added bonus of being taxed on them.