Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

John McCain wants you to buy health insurance. If your employer doesn't provide health insurance, McCain would like to give you a $2500 (and perhaps $5000) tax credit to buy your own...money McCain would pay directly to the insurance companies. And he wants to pay for it by eliminating the tax break employers take for providing health insurance.

Yes, that's right...McCain wants to dis-incent your employer from providing health insurance in order to pay for the transfer of individuals' tax money directly to insurance companies. Talk about a bad idea...and completely inadequate to address the growing health care crisis in America. But I suppose it's to be expected from a campaign that's being advised by market fundamentalist free marketeers and failed CEOs...like Carly Fiorina, who was fired from HP for mismanaging the company:

"We know competition and choice drive down costs," said Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is advising the McCain campaign.

That's a tired old canard, Carly. McCain and his Republican ilk (plus a great number of Democrats) have been telling us for 30 years that the magic of competition on the free market will solve all that ails us. But 30 years of these policies applied to health care have resulted in 46 million uninsured, millions more underinsured, drastically increased out-of-pocket expenditures for most, and thousands of medical-related bankruptcies every year. 30 years of those same policies applied to credit and equity markets have given us the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression (which, by the way, was also the result of insufficient regulation and laissez-faire economic policies combined with government inaction). It's time our nation stopped buying into that kind of bullshit.