Straight Talk Express

I would say that John McCain's health-care proposal does have a couple moderately diverting ideas, like allowing interstate competition among health insurers (although how letting Blue Cross of Maryland compete with Blue Cross of California will lower costs ss beyond me) and allowing for the safe importation of prescription drugs. But while these cost-cutting measures are OK as far as they go, they do nothing to help cover the uninsured who aren't going to be helped by tax incentives since they don't make enough money. McCain only encourages insurer to spend less on administrative costs and more on actual health care; he only encourages hospitals to be more efficient; he only encourages people to buy coverage, adding to the risk pool. The measures he proposes are half-measures, but there's a very good reason for that. He is playing to the base:

Polls suggest that health care is the No. 2 issue for voters after the war in Iraq. Asked what particular health issue the presidential candidates should address, voters give roughly equal weight to costs and covering the uninsured as their main concerns.

Among Republican voters, however, costs emerge on top. Half of Republicans said they would like to see candidates focus most on reducing health-care costs, compared with 16% who express most interest in covering the uninsured, according to an August tracking poll by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

So the uninsured (which is a major contributing factor to the cost spiral, for a lot of reasons) can go screw, because Republicans by and large couldn't care less about them.

That's straight talk.

(It should be added that the centerpiece of McCain's proposal that addresses the uninsured is to give Americans a refundable tax credit to buy insurance, which is exactly George Bush's proposal that went nowhere in the Congress, mainly because a tax credit doesn't mean anything to someone who qualifies for the EITC, unless you want to refund their sales tax)