Paul Krugman doesn’t like John McCain’s health care plans very much:
Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.
So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.
It seems his deadline must have been too early to catch the latest twist from the McCain campaign. Faced with the accusation that swapping the tax deductible status of employer-provided health care for a $2,500 per person ($5,000 per family) CPI-indexed tax credit would constitute a net tax increase on the middle class, McCain’s people proclaimed that employer-provided plans would be subject to income tax, but not to payroll tax. No more net tax increase. But where’s the money going to come from? Well, it looks like $1.3 trillion over ten years in Medicare cuts is the answer. Igor Volsky observes that this is hardly the first time McCain has taken a stand against Medicare beneficiaries. One might have thought, as Krugman evidently did, that McCain would be too averse to the political risks to take up the mantle of Medicare slasher amidst a presidential campaign, but evidently he was just hoping that amidst his campaign’s oft-shifting story about the details of his health care plans nobody would notice.
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