6 posts tagged “mccain”

This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing.

I live in a student ghetto neighborhood in the most liberal part of Kansas (a state which will probably swing for McCain anyway, sigh), so I can only live vicariously through this thrilling account.

This morning when I tried to visit www.barackobama.com, my browser timed out on me. I tried just now and the page took a loooong time to load (5 or 10 seconds - I know, I'm impatient, but this is a high-speed network connection). This typically means that the site is being inundated with hits.

John McCain's site? Got right in with no waiting. And was immediately annoyed with it, because of this:

McCain is still trying to make political hay with Joe the Plumber

So of course I had to "make my own little sign" (with apologies to the Five Man Electrical Band - did you know they are Canadian?):

Mccainrallysign

1 comment

I filled in my real email address and zip code, but oddly enough, they haven't emailed me my sign yet.

if mccain wins, you'd better stay healthy

I don't understand why McCain (or anyone) thinks this is a good idea:

1. Start taxing employer-provided health care insurance benefits.
2. Give every taxpayer a $5,000 $2,500 credit toward health insurance. (Thanks for catching that, oaklandcat!)
3. Let everybody who isn't (still) covered by an employer-provided plan look for insurance on the open market.

Only someone who has been covered by really good (federally-provided) insurance for the past forty years or so and is now safely of Medicare age (can we say socialized medicine?) could think this sounds good.

Why is this a terrible idea?

1. Taxing employer-provided health care insurance benefits would cause some employers to stop providing them at all. I think another likely scenario that pundits don't bring up is that employers keep providing them, but cut their budgets elsewhere, perhaps even by cutting jobs, to make up the difference. (Great -- no insurance and newly jobless -- welcome to the brave new world of GOP health care policy!)

2. and 3. Okay, you've just announced to every insurance company in America that every taxpayer will at least be able to afford to pay $2,500 for health insurance. It's like calling ahead to the used car lot and telling the salesman you're sending somebody over who has $2,500 to spend. You might as well write SUCKER across their foreheads while you're at it. Insurance companies, wanting to maximize profits (it's what they do), will magically discern that insuring a healthy person with no preexisting conditions will cost about $2,500. The people who are less healthy? They'll pay more, if they can get insurance at all. If they can't get insurance at all, they are screwed. I would be in the "pay more because of imperfect health" category. Several people I know and love would be in the "totally screwed" category.

But wait, there's more! If you're in the "totally screwed" category and you get sick, don't worry; once you've run through all your own money and declared bankruptcy (which can take surprisingly little time), you can get Medicaid, paid for by more tax dollars! That $2,500 credit is beginning to look more and more like a simple giveaway to insurance companies. Should we be surprised? Giveaways to corporations are the GOP's area of particular expertise.

Besides all that, has no one on McCain's team realized how FRIGGIN' HARD it is to buy insurance on the open market? It takes a lot of legwork, it's expensive and stressful--even when you can get a plan you can afford that gives you the coverage you need.  You lose a huge advantage when you can't bargain collectively.

Of course, McCain has little experience dealing with health care in the real world, and no recent experience. When his first wife was in a terrible car accident, Ross Perot stepped in to pay her medical bills. To be fair, McCain was in a POW camp at the time, but I don't think Ross Perot can provide this sort of assistance on a national level. After McCain returned from Viet Nam and dumped his first wife for a heiress 18 years his junior, Perot took him off his Christmas card list, as did Nancy Reagan -- Nancy, who got the big shout-out from McCain at last night's debate, probably because he figured she'd be under heavy sedation at the time and wouldn't rise up from her hospital bed and give some tart response to the media.

At this point, McCain is rich (because of his second wife) and has excellent health care coverage (through his U.S. Senate gig). That would be all well and good if he weren't completely out of touch with the rest of us. I'm pretty sure he still thinks people who earn $250,000 a year are middle class, and the way he talks about his plan, he clearly thinks it would be our pleasure to go out and find our own health care coverage individually.

So again I ask you, who thinks this cluster is a good idea?  Even Joe the Plumber, the one guy in America who might slightly benefit from McCain's proposed tax policies, wouldn't benefit from this plan.

Not to be outdone by Redz, here is my own take...

I don't think they're kidding around

After Universal Music Publishing and Sony BMG sent a cease and desist notice to the McCain-Palin campaign over their use of Heart's "Barracuda," McCain's campaign announced it would just have to stick to songs that have fallen into the public domain, such as the works of Beethoven. "Maybe we could sneak in 'Cat Scratch Fever' or 'Stranglehold' by Ted Nugent," an unidentified McCain aide commented.