McCain's Stealth Path to Single Payer Health Care

by anderson

Certainly, a lot of people are making hay right now out of the health care deregulation burbling of John McCain, which appears in Contingencies, a journal of the Academy of American Actuaries. What does McCain propose? Why, he wants to open up "health care markets" to make them more like the banking industry, or I guess we should say, "the banking industry."

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.

The worst excesses of regulation! Hilarious, certainly.

But what people must not realize with McCain's proposal is that he is actually imagining a stealth attack on the privatized, for-profit health insurance business, which seeks to deny insurance coverage as much as possible. Clearly that must be the case, given the imperative socialist move of the US government vis-a-vis the "banking industry," the deregulation of which has now led directly to the vast government take-over of venerable Wall Street firms that had operated under the paradigm of deregulated "innovation."

You see, John McCain wants Americans to have single-payer health care and deregulation, as demonstrated by the very banking industry he cites, will be the fastest way for that to happen. But being the Republican presidential candidate, he just can't say that. That wouldn't sound very … Republican. So he proposes the usual claptrap that his party's free marketeers expect to hear knowing that it will lead to eventual collapse and government take-over. Bam! Single-payer health care.

Yes, I'm sure that's what John McCain must be thinking.