McCain: Deregulate health insurance, like banking
Better Care at Lower Cost for Every American
By John McCain
Contingencies
September/October 2008
We can no longer afford to promise more than we can deliver. Nor can we risk misdiagnosing the problem and devising a cure that might harm the patient.
The problem is not that most Americans lack adequate health insurance. The vast majority of Americans have private insurance, and our government spends billions each year to provide even more.
Fundamental health care reform must begin with restoring control to individuals and their families as health care consumers and patients and making them the central focus of our health care system.
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
http://www.contingencies.org/septoct08/mccain.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Let there be no doubt about John McCain’s plans for health care in America: Just as reducing the burden of government regulation of real estate lending has allowed more individuals to achieve the American dream of owning their own homes, reducing regulatory oversight of private insurers will make health care more affordable for all of us.
Many people made a lot of money in home loans while the regulators turned their backs. Of course, those people have walked away with their siphoned-off money in hand, and left us with a market that has destroyed the finances of individuals and shattered their dreams of home ownership. The magnitude of the crisis is so great that the government had to step in and use our tax dollars to prevent the collapse of the economy.
John McCain now wants the regulators to turn their backs on the private insurance industry. By selling us insurance products that are affordable, many people will make a lot of money. When those underinsurance products fail to protect us from financial hardship whenever we need heath care, our personal finances will collapse, and the financing of the health care industry will be disrupted, resulting in the impending collapse of the health care delivery system. By then, those who profited will have walked away with their siphoned-off money in hand, leaving us with a health care crisis that only the government will be able to repair, using our tax dollars to prevent the collapse of our health care system.
Just as a robust deregulated market in sub-prime lending and mortgage-backed securities was not the solution to expand home ownership to more Americans, a robust deregulated market in private health underinsurance plans can never make health care affordable for those who need it.
Barack Obama understands that if private insurance plans are to fulfill their function of making health care affordable, then the market must be tightly regulated, and underinsurance products must be prohibited. He also understands that private plans that actually work are no longer affordable for the majority of Americans. That is why he decided against mandating universal health care coverage; you can’t buy a plan if you don’t have the money to pay for it.
Neither a market of deregulated private plans nor a market of tightly-regulated private plans will work. Continuing to rely on the private insurance market will compound the crisis in health care financing, eventually forcing a government buyout of the system. Instead of waiting for more pain, suffering, financial hardship, and even death, let’s adopt a system that actually would make health care affordable for all of us: a single payer national health program.
Isn’t prevention better than a salvage operation?