I have a serious question, and I'm curious why it hasn't been asked...

[jsbowden]

McCain's health care plan is a 5k tax credit.

My question is this:

How does this help families who are so poor they already don't pay taxes?

Seriously. Why hasn't one single reporter asked him or Palin this question? A five thousand dollar tax credit isn't going to give them the money to buy health insurance. We're talking about people who just worry about making rent and eating. And are the folks most likely to end up sick.

If someone has, and I missed it, what was the answer?

The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor...
U2

Comments

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

Define 'artificially inflated', please?

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Our medical system has set the pricing for medical care at everything the insurance industry will bear. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of the process and is the result of long iteration of our pooled risk, pooled payment system. Nowhere eles in the world does medicine cost what it does here.

[cerebresque.livejournal.com]

That, I call structural failure, in re bad regulatory choices that require insurance to cover elective/chronic/routine care as well as acute care, and which set up insurance pools in a way that no actuary would consider reasonable. See my proposal for reform in other comment.

Of course, there are also other factors - like that we are perhaps the only country in the world that buys pharmaceuticals at the market price, since most nationalized healthcare nations have monopsonic purchasing organizations, and that price is inflated by that very monopsony.

And, of course, minor things such as being able to get the result of the pathology on your suspected-cancer biopsy overnight, instead of three months later, your MRI in good time, and so on and so forth, but while that is more expensive to achieve, I think the poor bugger with the cancer doesn't mind so much, eh?