Yesterday, at an event promoting health care reform, “David B. Snow Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of Medco Health Solutions, one of the country’s largest health care companies,” argued that “Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s plan to eliminate the tax break for employer-provided health insurance ‘will create chaos‘”:

I’m very frightened of the conversations that try to shift responsibility away from employers to individuals…There will be more uninsured.

Snow is not the first industry leader to criticize the tenets of McCain’s health care plan. In August, Humana CEO Mike McCallister endorsed the progressive prescription of universal health insurance:

We don’t have the right economic model because not everyone is in the risk pool….getting everyone in the risk pool or getting them covered is the right thing to do. We’re wealthy nation, we should find a way to do that.

Most Americans agree with Snow and McCallister, at least in part. According to the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll, only 39 percent of Americans think that McCain would “better handle” health care.

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A new analysis of the effects of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health plan on women’s access to health care finds that “tens of millions of women would be at risk of losing their current insurance coverage even though they use health services more frequently than men, suffer chronic-illness more often than men, and require maternity care and other reproductive health services.” The report estimates that:

- 30 million women with chronic illnesses would be at risk of losing their employer-sponsored health insurance

- Millions of women would be steered into the unregulated national insurance market, where they would experience coverage denials and pre-existing condition exclusions

- Deregulation of insurance companies would erode state protections, including guarantees for critical preventive services

Moreover, “by permitting plans to cherry-pick their state of residence as well as enabling plans to sell policies without regard to state insurance rules through so-called ‘association health plans,’” McCain’s plan would encourage “insurers to eliminate coverage of basic health services,” the report notes. Thus, women could lose state protections that require insurance companies to cover contraception, cervical cancer screenings, breast reconstruction, maternity care, and annual breast, ovarian, and cervical cancer screening.

McCain’s plan reduces costs by providing less coverage. And while healthy people (or the not-yet sick) could benefit from McCain’s proposal, Americans who actually need care will find themselves without coverage.

Read the full report here.

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The Wonk Room has long argued that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) plan to eliminate the current employer tax exemption for health benefits and provide all Americans with a $2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for families) would lead some employers to drop health coverage. On Monday, at an event at the American Network of Community Options and Resources, an employer re-framed the argument:

Q: My question around McCain plan is simply this: What would prevent employers from increasing their employee contribution by $2500 and neutralizing the impact to people that apparently it is designed to help?

Jennifer Tolbert, Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured: Right. There is actually nothing in there that would prevent that. And in fact, I think, one of the potential downsides of the McCain plan is that it actually could, might, lead some employers to drop coverage all together.

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An analysis of McCain’s health care proposal by the Tax Policy Center estimates that by 2013, 16 million people would lose the health benefits they receive from their employers and projects that 55 million Americans will be uninsured.

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