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.

This is what Republican nominee John McCain had to say about health care reform in his acceptance speech last night: 

My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.

1. As Ezra Klein puts it: Spoken like a man who, on the one hand, has never used an HMO, and on the other, has never been off government health care a day in his life, and is healthy enough to run for president at 72. 
2. Also, it is of course, just another outright Republican lie; acutally two lies: On the one hand, McCain’s plan does not even make a pretense of trying to reduce uninsured or underinsured. To the extent it makes any claims, false as they are also, it is about cost control.  On the other hand, Obama’s plan does nothing to force people into a government plan.  Remember his is the plan among the Democrats that does not have mandates for adults.  At best, it tries to offer a public option for those that cannot get covered in the private for-profit sector.
3. Still it is a good example of how even after pre-compromising and offering a “respectable moderate” plan that keeps the private for-profit insurance companies front and center, the Democrats will still get attacked as if they actually had proposed Single Payer.  If you are going to take the heat, at least offer the benefit.  Sigh.

 Meanwhile, this article in todays Washington Post suggest that as governor in Alaska, Sarah Palin has been a knee-jerk free market fundamentalist with a typical misunderstanding of the reality of “competition” in the health care sector.  Basically she wanted to do away with “certificate of need” regulation, ostensibly so free market competition could lower costs and increase access, which just happened to coincide with the interests of some of her big donors.  As it failed to work (paging the Dartmouth Atlas) she created an advisory panel, packed with some of the same special interests.  When even they suggested changing course, she over ruled them.  I guess like Bush/Cheney, we would not want to listen to any, you know, experts.

So what else did you take away from the Republican convention?