The Deregulator

Nobody's buying this reinvented John McCain singing the glories of government regulation of the financial markets and vowing to get the bad guys off Wall Street, are they? If they are, could you have them peek at this, from an article McCain wrote THIS MONTH for a trade publication?

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

McCain's been a free-market fundamentalist for a long time. Or at least his advisers are; there is no economic battlefield you can bomb so he likely takes a laissez-faire attitude toward his own opinion as well as the markets at large.

As if the health care system weren't already immoral enough, McCain wants insurance companies to come up with the same kinds of attractive "innovative instruments" that the banking industry was free to do, unencumbered by any oversight. Maybe they can create "MRI default swaps" or "collateral knee surgery obligations" or some other fun packaged security that could be sold to China. After all, why shouldn't they have a say over whether or not you get your medication?