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]

Well, that's not really a very applicable analogy, now is it?

For one, per Warren vs. District of Columbia, et. al., law enforcement is not a general protective service handed out to the citizens. The government specifically has no affirmative duty whatsoever to protect or rescue anyone. Law enforcement is the government's instrumentality of punishing the people who defy it after the fact, not protecting its citizens from crime before the fact, and any rescuing of hostages, recovering of kidnappees, et. al. are, well, nice to have, but not their core mission. So it's fundamentally different on that point.

Nevertheless, let's play with it. Obviously, it remains a market good. It's an odd case of a market good, but it still is one, since it has a value to its recipient and a cost to its supplier - even though it's both monopolistic (it has one supplier; the government, which has a legal monopoly on the use of force) and monopsonic (it has one purchaser; the government, which pays all the costs and determines how much you get).

And so, there is necessarily rationing. You don't get all the searching you may think is justified for your kidnapped child for as long as there's any possible hope. You don't get air-sea rescue teams searching everywhere possible for as long as possible. You get what the government deems is cost-effective. (And if you honestly believe that the kidnapping of the son of J. Random Prole and the kidnapping of the son of, say, Bill Gates receive exactly equivalent attention from the FBI, well, that's kind of naive, I would have to say. Even if only on the purely triagic grounds that the latter is much more likely to be found alive.) If you're wealthy, you get to work around this - because you're able to hire as many modern Pinkertons and search helicopters as money will buy to do things your way.

((Which is exactly analogous to, by the way, what you see happening when a bunch of Canadians or Englishmen or assorted other foreign chaps and chapesses turn up in hospitals in this country, because they happen to think that their valuation of their own lives is more valid than the one assigned to them by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Minister of Health, or some other random bod who isn't them.))

Additional: Leaving aside the moral argument, for the moment - which, incidentally, is not in the least affected by what other people happen to be doing now either in other areas, or in other countries; you might as well argue that healthcare ought to be fully private because food is, and everybody needs food even more than they need healthcare - there is also the pragmatic point that both of these things are orders of magnitude cheaper than healthcare. We could throw lots more money at both of them and they'd be lost in the decimals by comparison.

Additional additional: Why shouldn't ship and yacht owners repay the Coast Guard for rescue operations and carry some sort of 'sinking insurance' to do so? And for that matter, drivers repay car owners for, say, the fire department cutting them out of their vehicles, carrying their insurance to do so? This would be a much better system, both because it avoids moral hazard, and because it ensures that risk is borne by, and risk information is available to, the people who have the power to minimize or maximize risk.