In today’s New York Times, blogger Floyd Norris suggests that universal health care reform would reduce military recruitment rates by undermining the military’s generous health benefit incentive:

A significant factor for many recruits, it turns out, is the military’s generous health benefits for dependants…It seems a bit perverse that the incentives for a young person with children to join are greater than the incentives for his childless friend. But that is the way it is. All that could change if the push for some kind of national health insurance program were to be successful.

The notion that Americans should be deprived of health insurance for national security purposes is both perverse and illogical. In fact, Norris’ implication, which suggests that the government must maintain a disparity between civilian and military entitlements, overstates the financial benefit of enlisting and contradicts the needs of the military.

Few Americans cash-in from their military service. “The Department of Defense estimates that its employees take a $20,000-per-year pay-and-benefits hit relative to civilians the same age throughout their careers.” Moreover, according to Christopher Jehn, former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for force management and personnel, soldiers who are forced into service weaken the military’s capabilities.

Second, because service members are all volunteers, the military has far fewer discipline problems, greater experience (because of less turnover) and thus, more capability. Based on this experience, U.S. military leaders today are thoroughly convinced that a return to the draft could only weaken the armed forces. This is why, when students at the Naval Postgraduate School (mainly U.S. military officers), are asked whether they would like to return to the draft, there are few takers. As one put it, “Why would I want to be in charge of people who don’t want to be there?”

The burden of serving in the army should also be shared by all Americans, not just by the poor or the uninsured. Unfortunately, the underprivileged are already over-represented in the armed forces. While the Defense Department does not track how much recruits earn before they enlist, a study by the non partisan National Priorities Project “that compares home ZIP codes of new recruits to tax return data for those areas” found that “neighborhoods with low- to middle-median household incomes are over-represented,” while areas “with high-median household incomes are under-represented.”

Americans who lack health insurance should not be forced to join the military in order to obtain it. If a government must deny its citizens benefits to entice recruits to war, perhaps that war is not worth fighting.

The purported mission of the USDA’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program is to provide “nutritious foods, nutrition education, and referrals to health and other social services” to mothers and children in need. The $6 billion WIC program is administered by the states to assist over 8 million people each year. But as a local farmers market manager has discovered, the Michigan Department of Community Health has decided that “nutritious foods” means a ban on organic foods, evidently in a misguided effort to save money.

The Michigan WIC Food Card says “No organic allowed” after nearly every food item — milk, eggs, dry beans, peanut butter, carrots, tuna, cereal, juice, cheese, infant juice, infant formula, and infant cereal. Honey Bunches of Oats, Frosted Mini-Wheats, and other corn-syrup-sweetened cereals are allowed, while organic cereals are not. Cage-free, free-range, Omega-3, and low-cholesterol eggs are also banned. No organic tuna is allowed, even though there is no such thing.

Diana Jancek, co-founder of the Sweetwater Local Foods Market, Michigan’s first all-sustainable local farmers market reported her discovery to a local listserv. In her message, which was also forwarded to the Community Food Security Coalition’s food security mailing list, she describes what she found when she went to the local Meijer supermarket with the flyer:

Allowed: Frosted Mini-Wheats (first three ingredients Whole Grain Wheat, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup), 18 oz. — $3.63
Not Allowed: Meijer Organic Raisin Brain (all organic, no corn syrup), 17 oz. — $2.99

Allowed: Jif Peanut Butter, 18 oz. — $2.18
Not Allowed: Meijer Organic Peanut Butter, 18 oz. — $2.59

Allowed: Fresh Conventional Carrots, 1 pound — $1.30
Not Allowed: Fresh Organic Carrots, 1 pound — $.99

Allowed: Conventional White Eggs — $1.69
Not Allowed: Conventional Brown Eggs — $1.89

Allowed: V8 Tomato Juice, 46 oz. — $2.79
Not Allowed: Organic Tomato Juice, 46 oz. — $2.99

Ironically, Michigan has participated since 1988 in the USDA Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which allows WIC participants to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables — without a “no organic” restriction — at local farmers markets like the one Diana Jancek runs. Unfortunately, each participant is only given a single $20 voucher booklet for the entire year.

UPDATE: Tom Philpott at Gristmill notes that the approved Jif peanut butter includes partially and fully hydrogenated vegetable fats, shown to cause severe heart damage as well as diabetes. He writes:

For those who don’t think low-income mothers should be nudged to make such choices, no matter what state they live in, Martha Noble of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition points out that the USDA’s Food & Nutrition Service is currently taking public comments on 2009 reauthorization of several child-nutrition programs, including WIC.

Peter Suderman, at American Spectator’s blog, has proven again that conservatives don’t understand health care. In reference to a recent Center for American Progress Action Fund report showing that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health plan will dramatically increase administrative costs in our health care system, Suderman states, “What’s going to happen is that, under McCain’s plan, more people will make the switch to the individual market, which has cheaper plans but higher administrative costs.”

“According to the numbers CAP cites in its own study, individual market plans are far less expensive than those purchased through the group/employer market,” he adds. Suderman concludes:

So the real message here is that John McCain wants to promote health insurance plans that cost less money.

Suderman is missing the point. The plans McCain wants to promote cost less because they’re worth less. As insurance guru and Georgetown University professor Karen Pollitz has said:

It’s true that the advertised prices for many individual policies in many states are eye-poppingly low. The policies often cover very little: $5,000 deductibles, four doctor visits a year, no drugs.

Studies show that plans on the individual market have lower premium costs because they offer much weaker protections than those in the group market:

— Individual market policies offer weaker financial protections, despite their costs having risen by more than one third from 2001 to 2004. [Health Affairs, 2008]

— Basic benefits are frequently excluded from individual plans, such as maternity, prescription drugs, and mental health — with any pre-existing conditions more often than not being permanently excluded from coverage. [Commonwealth Fund, 02/05]

— In 2007, median out-of-pocket medical expenses for those with individual health insurance policies were $2,264 as compared to $973 for people with employer-based plans. [Consumer Reports, 01/08]

There are other reasons that individual market plans are cheaper. For example, the plans cherry pick the healthiest people to enroll, something that they will continue to try to do under the McCain approach.

The bottom line is that John McCain thinks that health care costs are too high because people get too much health care. That’s why, under his plan, individuals are left to fend for themselves to get the coverage they need. McCain is so driven to achieve this change that he is willing to waste roughly $20 billion more annually in paperwork to expand the individual market.

This morning, the McCain campaign finally released Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health records. The delayed disclosure comes on the heels of three broken pledges to release the senator’s health documents and contrasts sharply with the way McCain released his records during the 2000 campaign. In fact, while McCain proudly disclosed “1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records” in 1999 and gave journalists “direct access” to his personal physician, he has circulated “precious little medical information” after being diagnosed and undergoing surgery for melanoma in August 2000:

At least three times since March 2007, campaign officials have told The New York Times that they would provide the detailed information about his current state of health, but they have not done so. The campaign now says it expects to release the information in April.

McCain’s secrecy and reluctance to discuss his health has raised several eyebrows among medical doctors. While repeatedly claiming to be in “excellent” health, McCain has delayed the release of his records. During an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes in March, McCain promised to release his medical records in April:

PELLEY: At 71 years old, McCain’s health has been an issue. After his presidential race in 2000, he was diagnosed with the most lethal form of skin cancer. How’s your health?

MCCAIN: It’s excellent. It’s excellent, excellent. Thank you. And we’ll be doing the medical records thing with the media sometime in the next month or two.

PELLEY: There has been some criticism that you have not released your medical records.

MCCAIN: Mm-hmm.

PELLEY: You’re saying in this interview that you’re about to do that.

MCCAIN: Oh, I will do it in the next month or so, yeah.

Two months later, the records are out. But today’s release comes with certain caveats that were missing from his previous disclosure. Rather than allowing full and open access to all interested media organizations, McCain is releasing some of his records to a select group of reporters who “can neither photocopy nor keep the documents”; they will only “be allowed to take notes from the records.”

McCain’s handpicked reporters will have to scribble fast, but the senator may change his mind before they finish. Just eight days ago, during a campaign event in Columbus, Ohio, McCain promised that his “administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability.” Today’s holiday weekend document dump suggests that McCain may continue Bush’s secretive ways.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post notes: “Notably absent from the list is the New York Times. Could this have anything to do with [who] wrote the paper’s controversial article about McCain’s ties to lobbyist Vicki Iseman?”

Earlier this month, Cato’s Michael Cannon argued that healthy individuals who purchase health insurance using Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) proposed health care tax credit, could buy “more secure coverage of high-cost conditions than the current job-based system” allows:

Researchers such as Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Susan Marquis of the RAND Corporation have found that the individual market covers lots of people with high-cost medical conditions — so long as they purchased the insurance when they were healthy… Over the long term, then, McCain’s plan would provide more secure coverage of high-cost conditions than the current job-based system does.

Cannon is mistaken. In what is known as ‘the death spiral,‘ health insurance companies entice healthy candidates into cheap plans and then increase prices for sicker patients. Consumer Reports explains the tactic like this:

[Companies] stop accepting new customers in a plan, which kicks off a process known as a “death spiral.” Even if everyone in an insurance plan starts out relatively healthy, as time goes on, people get sick, and the cost to insure them rises. Once the pool is closed, costs for the remaining members rise inexorably. Healthier members find cheaper plans, but sicker ones are effectively forced out because they can’t afford coverage.

While healthy patients who pass another round of medical underwriting can switch to a cheaper plan, patients who develop a disease after purchasing their coverage, fail their underwriting, and are stuck paying higher prices:

“Jesse Paul, 59, an Indianapolis lawyer, paid $25.50 a month for his individual, $100- deductible Prudential major medical policy when he took it out in 1980. Premiums rose steadily for years but at a pace that Paul deemed “rational in terms of medical costs.” In 2003 the premium shot up from about $1,200 to about $1,900 a month at renewal.

When Paul complained to the state insurance department, he learned that the policy had been closed to new entrants for years, that he was one of only 400 to 600 customers left in the state, and that the premium increase was permissible under Indiana law. Paul reached his breaking point when he got his latest renewal notice in August; the monthly premium was now $4,284.“

Cannon claims that allowing anyone with pre-existing conditions to purchase insurance would “invite irresponsible behavior.” It’s curious that Cannon thinks the current behavior of private insurance companies, who would be further unregulated by McCain’s plan, isn’t “irresponsible.”

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal argues that rather than reducing costs, the 2006 universal health care reform in Massachusetts has led to run-away public spending and an over reliance on the publicly-subsidized health care option. The Journal complains that “the ‘connector’ that was supposed to link individuals to private insurance options has barely been used” and proposes that “the real problem in health care is the way the tax code and third-party payment system distort incentives“:

That’s where John McCain has been focusing his reform efforts – because that really does have the potential to reduce costs while covering more of the uninsured – and Republicans ought to follow his lead.

Ironically McCain’s efforts to reform the tax code, create — rather than eliminate– a “real problem.” His plan increases costs across the board because it eliminates the tax incentives for employer-based insurance programs and pushes individuals out of diversified employer-based health pools and into the individual insurance market.

McCain replaces the employer health tax credit with a one-size fits all tax credit of $5,000 per family ($2,500 tax credit for individuals) for the first year. And while this credit may assist a limited number of families who currently lack any kind of health insurance, workers who receive a higher tax subsidy through employer-based plans would experience a tax increase; Americans with pre-existing medical conditions would either be locked-out of the system by the prohibitive costs of insurance in the individual market or fail to find insurance that covers their conditions.

Insurance costs would increase for the individual consumer and the insurance company. While insurance firms would have to spend more money “marketing and processing individual plans,” the individual consumer would have to stretch McCain’s tax credit to cover the ever-growing costs of medical premiums. This is because McCain indexes the growth of his initial $5,000 offering to inflation, not premiums. And, since premiums grow at a higher rate than inflation, McCain’s proposal imposes $3.6 trillion tax increase on the consumer.

Far from “reducing costs” and “covering more of the uninsured,” McCain’s Bush-like health care proposal increases personal health care costs and administrative costs and leaves more people un-insured and underinsured.

While Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has claimed that his health care proposal would reduce administrative costs, a new study released by the Center for American Progress Action Fund suggests that his plan to shift coverage from the group market to the individual market could generate as much as $20 billion in new administrative costs—which represents an increase of more than 20 percent in 2007 dollars.

The study flips McCain’s small government rhetoric on its head. Since McCain’s plan seeks to shift enrollment from the employer-based insurance market to the individual market, insurers would have to spend much more money marketing and processing individual plans and waste premium dollars on the medical review and legal costs of underwriting and rescission. These costs are significant and are the fastest growing part of health care, as shown in the below chart:

Administrative costs are what insurance companies use to deny coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions. We need to spend less on administration, not more. Senator McCain takes health care in the wrong direction.

Read the full report.

Yesterday, former Hewlett Packard CEO and McCain campaign surrogate Carly Fiorina had an enlightening interview with BlogHer touching on John McCain’s healthcare plan.

We’re all familiar with the rhetoric that is McCain’s proposal. When asked exactly how McCain would ensure that people, particularly children, were able to get healthcare, she had an answer we’ve never heard before: “guaranteed access.” Fiorina said:

[T]he combination of guaranteed access, tax credits, and a set of health care and health insurance options that are more affordable and more accessible will ensure that children have access to both health insurance and health care.

Listen to it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/05/Fiorina.320.40.flv]

Fiorina’s answer came in a question about children’s health care — namely, how would McCain ensure that parents use his tax break to pay for their children’s health insurance rather? Fiorina replied with particularly peculiar circular logic: McCain’s plan has “guaranteed access.”

Yet there’s nothing “guaranteed” about McCain’s health care plan. First, it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for people with preexisting conditions — including Sen. McCain himself, a cancer survivor — to obtain health insurance. Second, it would dismantle the system through which the vast majority of working Americans — and their families — get health coverage today, by ending employer-based insurance.

In fact, McCain’s vote against expanding SCHIP ensured that more children would be denied the very “guarantee access” the program promises. BlogHer should have asked McCain how he would guarantee access for uninsured American children whose parents are forced to decide between purchasing a private health insurance plan and paying off an inflated mortgage that keeps their child out of a homeless shelter.

Sorry, Carly. “Guaranteed access” is nothing more than empty health care rhetoric, like the rest of McCain’s health care plan.

Our guest blogger is Robin Chait, a Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At an education meeting yesterday, Mike Smith — Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation — recounted a sad story from a recent meeting with Superintendents. One of the Superintendents said that he had been going to a lot of funerals of students in his district lately. The others asked why, was there an increase in gang violence? The Superintendent responded no. The deaths were from cavities. Children in America are dying from cavities.

An article in the Washington Post today reports on a study that finds “the difference in death rates between highly educated and poorly educated people in the United States is very wide and growing wider.” While the study can’t conclude that low educational attainment causes increases in mortality, clearly there is a relationship between the two. The failure to improve education for disadvantaged students has implications for the health of our population, and the failure to provide adequate health care for all has implications for educational achievement.

It’s not that educational achievement can’t be improved without addressing the health of students, or that we couldn’t improve health outcomes without first increasing educational attainment. It’s that the consequences of not addressing either exacerbate both. When only about 50% of poor and minority students are graduating high school nationally, there’s a critical need for a greater national investment in addressing this problem. What we’ve had over the past eight years is little new funding for improving low performing schools. And we know that people with health insurance are generally healthier and that income is associated with having health insurance. When 19.3% of children in poverty are uninsured, it’s clear we have a national crisis on our hands.

It’s also clear that the Bush administration hasn’t made the needs of low-income people a priority in any policy arena.

Our guest blogger is Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Senator John McCain finally addressed an issue that progressive candidates have been advocating since the beginning of the election: comprehensive health care reform. But rather than offer real solutions to our health care crisis, Senator McCain has re-hashed failed Bush policies and embraced the tired rhetoric of the conservative right. Senator McCain has tried to brand progressive efforts to reform the health care system as nothing more than socialized medicine or “nationalized health care.” Senator McCain’s assertions are not only misleading, they are factually wrong.

Contrary to Senator McCain’s belief, providing universal health coverage does not require the nationalization of our health care system. Indeed, last month, an informative Frontline documentary examined several capitalist democracies with universal coverage systems that are not run by the government. Many of the issues raised in the documentary confirm my own conclusions that better quality care can — and is — being provided for less money in countries around the world.

While Senator McCain spends his time trying to debunk progressive efforts to provide affordable health care coverage to every American, our health care system continues to erode. This week, the Save the Children foundation released a report that ranked the United States 22nd in the world on women’s health, 28th on mothers’ health, and 33rd on children’s health – behind Poland, Slovakia and Latvia. Senator McCain and President Bush can take full credit for our dismal ranking on children’s health: both are outspoken opponents of the critically needed extension and expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Americans should be concerned about is that Senator McCain continues to promote failed Bush health care policies that would dismantle the employer-based health insurance system and shift people to the discriminatory individual insurance market. Health care reform is a priority of the American people, and progressives will work hard to make it reality.

For more, check out Center for American Progress’ new report: “The Specter of Socialized Medicine: What Is It and Is It Invading Our Country?”

An analysis of John McCain’s health care plan by Cato Institute’s Michael F. Cannon argues that “Sen. McCain’s plan is a lot better than his critics suggest.” We disagree. Here’s why:

Cannon argues that, contrary to Elizabeth Edwards’ claim that McCain’s embrace of the private market wouldn’t secure coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, “the individual market covers lots of people with high-cost medical conditions — so long as they purchased the insurance when they were healthy.” Not only that, but “those high-cost patients do not pay premiums that correspond to their health risk, and their coverage does not disappear when they change jobs.”

But Cannon, in his enthusiasm to defend McCain, overlooks some important facts:

McCain’s Plan Would Weaken The Ability Of Sick People To Keep Their Private Insurance: The main reason (not mentioned by Cannon) that some people who develop health problems can renew their health insurance without seeing higher premiums is federal regulation through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). States have improved on these regulations, offering more protections to sick consumers of private health insurance, but John McCain, in his push for an unregulated national market, would undermine these additional protections.

McCain’s Plan For The Uninsurable Is Woefully Inadequate: While only 5% of non-elderly Americans participate in the individual insurance market, 56 million chronically ill people are currently covered by employer-based health insurance plans, which can absorb the cost of these high-risk individuals because their pools are diversified. McCain would eliminate the tax incentive to keep these plans active, and nudge many of these folks into the private market where insurers would be reluctant to cover them. McCain’s answer? Dubious “high-risk” pools. Cato’s answer? Thoroughly debunked “Health Savings Accounts.”

There Are Better Alternatives That McCain Opposes: Cannon argues that McCain’s plan “provide more secure coverage of high-cost conditions than the current job-based system does” — but the way to provide the best security is a method which McCain adamantly opposes: offer a competing non-discriminatory, flexible alternative to employee based coverage by letting any American join a system like the one members of Congress use to get their insurance.

As the Des Moines register editorial board opined, McCain’s “dangerous experiment…should scare the heck out of the millions of Americans who rely on employer-based coverage.”

An LA Times piece today contrasts John McCain’s health care plan with the Democratic candidates’ plans by implying McCain is more concerned about health care “costs” while his opponents main concern is “coverage.”

But cost control and universal coverage are not mutually exclusive– they are inextricably connected. By neglecting the 47 million Americans without health insurance, McCain is neglecting one of the best ways to bring costs under control: universal coverage that reduces pricey, last-minute hospital visits by uninsured patients, lowers administrative costs, and encourages cost-effective preventive care.

Furthermore, McCain’s plan would increase the amount America’s families would spend on health care in a few key ways:

Eroding away the value of families’ health care tax benefit: McCain would eliminate the tax break for employee-based coverage, replacing it with a $2,500 tax credit for individuals ($5,000 for families) to help pay for private health insurance. Disturbingly, however, this credit will be pegged to general inflation instead of the price of premiums, the net effect being a “massive tax increase.”

Confusing cheaper coverage with lower costs: McCain wants to shift as many families as possible into an unregulated national insurance market where some people — particularly young, healthy people — may find coverage with enticingly low monthly premiums. But these attractive premiums would disguise, as Ezra Klein points out, “very high deductibles, lots of personal financial risk, and relatively sparse coverage.” After all, when insurance companies “cut costs,” they aim for one thing: denying as much coverage as possible.

Shifting struggling families into flawed, expensive “high-risk” pools: For unlucky families struggling with pre-existing conditions like cancer, heart disease or diabetes, McCain’s plan would offer a chance to buy into “high-risk pools.” Only trouble, these pools have many of the same draconian limitations as the unregulated private market: waiting periods, premiums that are out of reach for many families, substantial deductibles and co-pays, and limits on mental health and maternity care.

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The National Review editors defend Sen. John McCain’s health care plan, disputing that it hurts people with existing illnesses. Today we learned that group includes Jay Cutler, who is healthy enough to be the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos but also has diabetes.

So how will the McCain plan ensure that people with chronic illnesses can buy coverage? The National Review takes a pass on advocating the McCain campaign’s preferred solution, high-risk pools that subsidize last-resort insurance. Instead, it argues that people who buy their own insurance while healthy will no longer lose it when they change jobs.

Fair enough, but this line of reasoning leaves out the 56 million chronically ill people covered by their employers today. And while individual insurance is generally renewable, “premiums can still increase dramatically for people who develop health problems.” So buying insurance when you’re healthy doesn’t guarantee that you can keep it when you’re sick.

There is a better way to make sure that people can always buy the coverage they need: require insurers to sell to all comers at fair rates and create new subsidies to ensure that premiums are affordable.

To top off his “Health Care Week” John McCain has released an ad entitled “Bold Solutions.” Watch it:

Here’s a little reminder of what those “bold solutions” entail:

• Boldly leave 56 million people with pre-existing conditions vulnerable in the private market
• Boldly threaten coverage for 158 million workers
• Boldly let insurance companies refuse coverage to folks with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or dangerous jobs
• Boldly dole out a $2 billion tax cut for big insurance companies
• Boldly raise taxes on some families who buy health insurance
• Boldly propose a plan that costs $3.6 trillion over 10 years, over double what Clinton’s or Obama’s cost
• Boldly rely on expensive, debunked methods to only partially cover the poor and uninsured
• Boldly slash funding for hospitals that serve the uninsured without a plan for universal coverage
• Boldly deny coverage to a 9-year-old child with a cleft palate

Douglas Holtz-Eakin told the New York Times that, to attempt to cover people who fall through the (rather substantial) cracks in his health care plan, McCain would help pay for state “high-risk pools” by redirecting money “from existing federal programs that pay for uncompensated medical care, primarily in hospitals.”

Translation: Holtz-Eakin wants to eliminate some portion of the $7.8 billion in federal support for “Disproportionate Share Hospitals,” or DSH, which serve especially high numbers of poor and uninsured patients. This money is “the largest source of federal support for uncompensated care for uninsured patients.”

States across the country have used DSH money to provide “essential funding to many safety net hospitals” and “maintain access to health services for low-income patients.” States are already fighting back against Bush’s proposed sweeping cuts to Medicaid and changes to health regulations that shift costs to state and local governments, and John McCain is offering more of the same.

As a study by the National Health Policy Forum concludes, “in the absence of a viable plan to broadly expand health insurance coverage, support for providers that serve low-income patients will become increasingly critical.” But John McCain’s plan would leave millions of Americans without health insurance, so his disregard for DSH funds is a bit disturbing. Read more

The New York Times today did a good job pointing out that some people “could” pay more in taxes under the McCain plan. But the reality is that there is growing evidence that McCain has a massive new health tax as part of his plan, as this blog first discussed earlier. While the press typically portrays Democrats as the tax-and-spenders, McCain is on the verge of changing that paradigm with a plan that could have American’s spending $334 billion more in taxes over 10 years.

McCain’s advisors have confirmed that the spending under his tax credit plan is $3.6 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same amount that the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated would be spent by President Bush when he announced a similar policy. In the first year, the JCT estimated that the Bush policy would spend $220 billion in the first year.

This means the McCain’s spending on health reform is twice the price tag as Senators’ Clinton plan and Senator Obama’s. (Note: Senator Obama only describes his plan’s costs net of savings, but the Washington Post has published a cost estimate.)

Not only is the spending level very different between the Democrats and McCain, but the sources of funds vary as well. McCain would roll back the longstanding tax break for all 160 million Americans who obtain insurance through their employer. In contrast, the lower spending Democratic plans pay for health reform by rolling back President Bush’s tax cuts on the highest income Americans. Read more