McCain's health care problem: pre-existing conditions

After Catherine Morgan asked "Did You Know John McCain's Health Care Plan Does Not Include Preexisting Conditions?" over at BlogHer, I thought to myself "huh, really? Wow." and moved along. You know, I've got coverage right now; I don't have any serious pre-existing conditions (knock on wood) and gee, does anyone expect the Republican candidate to really care about health care?

But then a fairly brief post by Joseph Paduda over at Managed Care Matters made the point that McCain's plan "manages to cost more than the Obama or Clinton plans, while insuring far fewer people", and I thought "huh, that sounds like a mess, ad some pretty bad government that should really concern me even if I don't see its immediate impact on my own health and life."

OK, maybe I didn't think it exactly like that...but I was motivated to click over to the analysis that Joseph recommended, over at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review.

Here's Bob with the smackdown:

First, he is simply shunting the problem off to the states.

Second, he implies that one or more states have figured out what to do with people who can't get health insurance because of preexisting conditions. Just which state is that? I don't know of a single state that has been able to provide widely available access to health insurance for people who cannot get it.

Third, just who would finance this pool? States have tried so called high risk pools before. Time and again they are swamped by people trying to get in and there is never enough money. Since they have never worked before, how would they work this time? There were vague references to coming up with $7 billion in federal money here. Is that their proposal?

I really haven't been reading this blog enough to know whether his claims of a non-partisan approach are valid or not, but he does examine each candidate's plan, and I intend to subscribe and find out!

Here are links to his analyses of the candidate plans, so you can judge for yourself:

Clinton
McCain
Obama

Comments

[Trisha]

I didn't know it, but it doesn't surprise me. After all, he is a republican.