Today, during an appearance on Fox Business Channel, McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer disingenuously argued that the senator’s health care plan would cover “30 million” uninsured Americans and would be “budget neutral over 10″ years:

HOST: So Nancy, who foots the bill?

PFOTENHAUER: Well, our plan is budget neutral over 10 years… we insure 30 million, approximately, and we’re budget neutral over 10.

Watch it:

While most reports estimate that McCain’s plan would only cover an additional 5 to 7 million Americans, Pfotenhauer’s claim that the proposal would be “budget neutral” disguises large tax increases or huge budget deficits.

The McCain campaign estimates that its health care proposal would cost $3.6 trillion over ten years and promises to pay for it by exposing health benefits to income taxes.

But as the Tax Policy Center argues, income taxes alone fall $1.3 trillion short of paying for McCain’s health plan. At this point, the senator will have a choice: finance the proposal by exposing the health benefits to payroll taxes, thus forcing millions of American families to “foot the bill”, or add $1.3 trillion to the national deficit.

But, having promised to balance the budget by 2013 and not raise taxes, McCain is stuck in the impossible.

Today, the Pew Hispanic Center and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a new survey which found that 27 percent “of Hispanic adults in the United States lack a usual health care provider.” Some highlights:

- Among “Hispanic adults, the groups least likely to have a usual health care provider are men, the young, the less, educated, and those with no health insurance.”

- 41 percent: of Latinos say they lack health insurance because “they are seldom sick.”

- 49 percent: “of Latinos who lived in the United States for less than five years lack a usual health care provider, compared with 21 percent of those who have lived in the United States for 15 years or more.”

- 42 percent: “of the Latinos who have no health insurance lack a usual health care provider, compared with 19 percent of the insured.”

Comparatively, according to data form the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Hispanics are twice as likely as non-Hispanic blacks and three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to lack a regular health care provider.”

Lacking access to health care is both risky and costly. As the report notes, “preventive care and regular health monitoring are essential in maintaining good long-term health and limiting the severity of chronic diseases.” Unfortunately, Hispanics without a usual health care provider were much less likely to receive preventive treatment:

A new report from Aon Consulting Worldwide predicts that health care costs will increase by 10.6 percent in 2009, outpacing inflation.

And while the “increase is the smallest Aon has seen in six years,” the jump in costs still outstrips the growth of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ)’s much-touted health care tax credit. As James Kvaal, Peter Harbage, and Ben Furnas argue in a recent CAPAF report, since McCain indexes his health tax credit — $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families — to inflation, and not growing premiums (which are driven by increased cost), his credit depreciates every year:

As a result, McCain’s credit becomes a tax increase. For a couple earning $40,000 and paying $13,800 for insurance, “McCain’s new tax credit would cut their taxes by $50 in 2009, but because the credit quickly falls behind rising premiums that are the basis of the current tax break, the family would pay $1,169 more in taxes in 2013…[and] would pay $2,809 more in taxes by 2018.”