Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Earlier today, McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin answered critics of McCain’s health care plan, who say it could raise taxes on millions of middle-class families. He said:

[The McCain plan] is a transformation of the tradition of a tax subsidy to private insurance to make sure that subsidy is fair, both in the sense that it is available to every American regardless of the source of their private insurance and that every person gets the same amount — $5,000 for a family, $2,500 for an individual. The Obama campaign has chosen to characterize only one piece of a comprehensive health care reform as a tax policy and thus try to hit John McCain with it. It is classic political rhetoric at odds with the reality of dealing with an important problem, like the underinsured in America.

Actually, considered as a whole, McCain’s plan will raise taxes on millions of workers for two reasons. First, his plan would tax workers’ health benefits, which are largely tax-free today. Although he also creates a new tax credit for insurance premiums, many workers will pay more in taxes on their insurance then they get from the new credit.

Second, the value of McCain’s credit will erode quickly. While health care premiums are expected to grow by 7 percent a year, McCain’s credit will increase by only about 2 percent a year. In contrast, current tax benefits keep up with rising premiums.

More details on the tax implications of McCain’s health care plan are available here.

On Tuesday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) claimed that “Texas is a national model for improving access to health care because it limited lawsuits against doctors”:

We have created greater access to quality health care in Texas…How did we do it? Well, we passed Proposition 12…So, you have to understand what I mean when I say I want to make Washington, D.C., and the rest of our country more like Texas [because], frankly, we know the policies that actually work.

But Texas, which has the highest uninsured rate in the nation, is hardly a model of “quality health care.” In fact, if the national rate were the Texas rate, 29 million more Americans would lack health insurance.

As the Houston Chronicle points out, “malpractice issues are a small scab on Texas’ ailing health care system. The cancer is the number of uninsured. Increasing the number of doctors and specialties only does so much good when many Texans can’t afford to make an appointment.”

Indeed, despite assurances that malpractice reform would improve access to health care, after voters approved Proposition 12 in September 2003, little changed:

- 25 percent: or 5.6 million Texans are uninsured, the worst rate in the nation.

- 35 percent: of small businesses in Texas offer health insurance.

- 54 percent: of Texans under 65 have employer-sponsored coverage, “8 percentage points below the national average.”

- 48th in health care quality and efficiency: on the Commonwealth Fund’s State Scorecard “avoidable health costs” dimension – a measure that speaks to efficiency within the health care system.

- 1.8 percent: increase in direct care physicians between 2004 and 2006, “which is slower than it was pre-Proposition 12.”

For his part, Cornyn received a score of 0 from the American Public Health Association (APHA) (indicating an anti-public health record), initially voted against legislation that would have blocked a scheduled cut in the reimbursement rates of physicians treating Medicare patients and “was among 18 members of the 100-member Senate who opposed a huge expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.”

Unfortunately, Cornyn doesn’t “know policies that actually work.”