All independent non-partisan analyses of the McCain health plan have shown that it will do very little if anything to reduce the number of uninsured people.  Indeed, when first announced, that was not even promoted by the McCain campaign as its purpose. Their ideological fixation is with the idea that costs are increasing because there is too much care, and that free market fundamentalism is the cure.  Hence the plan is all about destroying the current predominant system of group health insurance via your employment, having you buy in the marketplace as an individual, and getting rid of state-based regulatory oversight.

However, seemingly out of the blue, came one, and only one, analysis that claimed McCain’s health plan would actually cover more than half of the nation’s 47 million uninsured, and two million more than the Obama plan.

Could it be that everybody else, including the wellknown non-partisan experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation  and The Commonwealth Fund  were wrong?

Thanks to Julie Rovner of NPR for connecting the dots of this phony Astroturf analysis:

1. The analysis is by Minnesota-based HSI Network LLC.
2. The lead author is Roger Feldman, University of Minnesota, health economics professor.
3. Feldman is longtime advocate of so-called “consumer-driven” health plans, the name given by its advocates to the free market fundamentalism described above.
4. Feldman’s frequent academic and writing partner is fellow U. MN professor Stephen Parente.
5. Stephen Parente is also a co-owner the HSI Network LLC. the company that that did the pro-McCain report.
6. McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin cited Stephen Parrente as a co-author of the McCain health plan.
7. QED: Left hand, meet right hand.

If you want to be pro-McCain so be it.  Just stop lying about it and claiming to be independent, when you obviously are not.

Will any academic associated with the McCain campaign have their reputations intact by the end of this campaign?

No.