Republicans screwed up the economy.

They led us into two wars.

They stripped away how many jobs?

Why on earth would ANY thinking person ever vote Republican?

Nope, sorry…no voting Republican for me. Not now. Not ever.

Thank you for your comment. Very insightful!

Obama’s plan is far from the ideal, but it is lightyears ahead of McCain’s plan. McCain’s plan is truly just more of the same discredited approach. As usual, his “ideas” are tactical and not strategic. The man has never shown any capacity for visionary or strategic thinking, ever, in his entire career.

As to this:

“You will get a tax credit of up to $5000. That is not money in your pocket, it is a credit taken on your tax return.”

Hopefully people understand that this is regressive. A $5000 tax credit saves you $2500 on your taxes if you’re at a 50% tax bracket, $1400 if you are at the 28% tax bracket, $750 if you are at the 15% tax bracket, and nothing at all if you’re too poor to pay taxes in the first place. It is impossible to imagine how such a plan can do anything at all to address the crisis at hand – a crisis that does not impact the wealthy, barely touches the upper middle class, and is most profound for middle class / working class, the poor, and small businesses.

If the average health insurance costs (including premiums, copays, and deductibles) for family coverage is $12,000 per year, it isn’t exactly exciting to have $750 of relief.

Of course, Republicans don’t care about that, but they do like to think of themselves as the party for business. Most business is small business, and many, if not most, small businesses struggle for years just to break even, much less produce sufficient profit for the owner to take home a salary. Thus, this kind of plan disincentivizes entrepreneurship and neighborhood small businesses because a tax break gives no help for those first few years of business ownership. Worse, the existing system makes starting a business very risky because sole proprietors typically cannot obtain a group medical plan (at least until they have enough employees to qualify), and thus are at risk of being dropped by an insurance carrier and not picked up by any others, or only at extortionary premiums with poor coverage. The fact that Republicans don’t get that proves that they are not the party of business, but rather the party of big corporate interests, which is a very different thing.

Both plans, I think, miss out on the fact that a major factor behind health care cost escalation is the role played by intermediate insurance carriers, coupled with the fact that employee-provided health care effectively shields the majority of Americans from the real costs, and consequently the real inflation of those costs. This allows cost bloating to go on behind the scenes, largely unchecked. For example, a worker may be paying a $75 per month premium when the real cost is more like $1000. The company tries to contain cost increases for the employees from one year to the next by moving to a lower quality plan with lesser coverage, more exclusions, or higher copays, or by reducing that year’s pay increases or other benefits, or by eliminating older workers from the payroll, whose higher costs drive up the overall group premium. None of these steps do anything to contain the total net costs of healthcare in the US, but thanks to these maneuvers going on year after year, the the majority of employees don’t see the real inflation either directly or fully. This makes healthcare inflation a lower priority than it should be on their list of concerns.

Republicans would have us believe that healthcare cost escalation is due to frivolous lawsuits (really a minor factor) and whining, never-happy working class people.

The real solution is to (a) get rid of the middleman – private insurance companies; (b) remove the employers from the equation so that each individual sees the actual costs directly; (c) give everyone equal access, including the unemployed and the self-employed.

It’s way too radical an approach to have any kind of chance any time soon. It’s about as likely as having either a black man or a woman in the Executive.

Oh, wait a minute. Maybe there is some hope in my lifetime after all.