Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Obama VS McCain Health Care: Contrasts, Pt. 2 – Assessing their proposals.

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Mr. McCain, pretty-much wants to get rid of Employee-based health insurance. Big shakeup, because we’ve been relying on it forever, since long before this crisis. About 60% of our population is relying on it, still today. The $2,500 tax incentive offered by Mr. McCain (for the lucky ones who’ll even get it) won’t begin to cover those $22,000 annual health insurance premiums the high-risk members have to pay. The paltry $5- $7 billion subsidy won’t begin to cover the numbers involved either. The numbers of this high-risk group with less-than-perfect health will rise rapidly, once the employer-based health insurance group plans go away. Things could get worse quickly.

Turning our attention to Mr. Obama, we see a very different scenario. Instead of dismantling our mostly-stable employer-based health insurance system, he is planning to build on it. He is also proposing a publicly-run health insurance program, set up by the government, which resembles Medicare.

As far as private insurance goes, Barack would not allow providers to gouge people who have serious illness, so people don’t have to live in such fear of losing bad jobs and becoming uninsurable thereafter. Some of our states already have this mandate (which might be nullified if McCain deregulates those mandates by allowing out-of-state health insurance companies to sell policies into those states).

With the Obama plan, there will also be substantial subsidies to assist “low- and moderate-income families to ensure they can afford to buy insurance,” as Mr. Baker words it. Some of these subsidies would come from assessing those employers who are not willing to offer health insurance to their employers, but the lion’s share (about $65 billion) would come from the expiration of a tax break to that amount that Bush had awarded to the very few Americans earning more that a quarter-million dollars annually. So is the contrast between McCain and Obama. Mr Baker has already selected the best ending for this article by saying “Hopefully, people will be aware of these distinctions when they cast their votes in November.”