Subject: [big campaign] FW: RELEASE: ANALYSIS OF McCAIN'S HEALTH CARE ANNOUNCEMENT
From: "Adam Jentleson @ American Progress Action" <[email-masked]>
To: "big campaign" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:41:54 -0400
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

Our analysis of McCain's health care plan.  

________________________________

From: Center for American Progress Action Fund
[mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 4:23 PM
To: Adam Jentleson @ American Progress Action
Subject: RELEASE: ANALYSIS OF McCAIN'S HEALTH CARE ANNOUNCEMENT

 <http://www.americanprogressaction.org/>   

For Immediate Release
April 29, 2008

Contact
John Neurohr, 202.481.8182 
[email-masked] 

RELEASE: ANALYSIS OF McCAIN'S HEALTH CARE ANNOUNCEMENT

Center for American Progress Action Fund releases new analysis of McCain
health care plan

Click here to read the full analysis
<http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/resource/> 

Washington, DC - While John McCain's health care plan is often described
as modest and incremental, in fact it makes far-reaching changes to our
health care system. He would replace the current tax breaks for
employer-sponsored health insurance with an across-the-board tax credit
of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. McCain would
deregulate private health insurance by creating a "national market,"
letting insurers locate themselves in states with minimal regulations
and preventing states from being able to protect their own citizens.

As a result, the McCain plan would radically change the health insurance
market, asking Americans buy health care plans on their own with few
regulations or consumer protections. There are praiseworthy elements in
McCain's plan, such as making tax benefits for health premiums more
progressive than they are today, recognizing the need for health
coverage independent of work, and emphasizing chronic care. However, on
balance, the plan is likely to make the health system worse than it is
today. The key highlights, or lowlights, are:

1. The McCain Plan Would Cause Millions To Lose their Health Benefits:
Most Americans - 158 million people - receive their health care through
their job. The McCain plan eliminates the tax exclusion for
employer-provided health insurance coverage so workers would pay taxes
on the value of their health benefits.

2. It Expands the Dysfunctional Individual Insurance Market: The McCain
plan shifts workers to the individual insurance market, which often
fails to prevent insurers from refusing to cover pre-existing illnesses
like cancer, denying coverage outright, or engaging in other
discriminatory practices. The purpose of insurance is to share risks
across a community, but insurers competing in the individual market
often find it easier to cut premiums by covering only healthy people.

3. 56 Million Chronically Ill Adults Are Particularly At Risk
<http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/chronic_disease.html>
: People with chronic diseases - who need insurance most -- are
particularly at risk from McCain's plan. Employers do not charge these
workers higher premiums, but insurers selling individual policies
usually do - if they cover them at all. There are 56 million non-elderly
adults with employer-sponsor health insurance who have at least one of
twelve chronic illnesses (this figure does not include children).

4. McCain's High-Risk Coverage Pools Will Be Inadequate: Today, McCain
is proposing spending $7 billion a year to subsidize high-risk pools for
people who could not obtain health insurance elsewhere. While Democrats'
plans call for creating access for everyone to be able to purchase the
health insurance they want, the McCain plan would limit the choice of
people with preexisting conditions to a national high-risk pool. To
develop his plan, McCain said that he would draw on the experiences of
the more than 30 states with experience in high risk pools. The
experience from the states is one of high costs and limited benefits.

5. The McCain Plan Gives Too Little to Low-Income and Sick Families:
Despite making tax breaks more progressive, the McCain plan does not go
nearly far enough to make insurance affordable. With average family
premiums exceeding $12,000, a $5,000 per family tax credit is simply
insufficient. This would be especially true in high-cost areas and for
people with high-cost diseases. McCain would also undermine the
guarantee of affordable coverage for millions of low-income children and
families currently enrolled in Medicaid. He would encourage states to
experiment with replacing Medicaid coverage with private insurance, or
providing alternative forms of access to care.

6. Raises Health Care Costs. McCain's plan relies on insurance
competition to lower costs, but it is more likely to lead insurers to
avoid risk rather than lowering costs. Shifting millions of households
into the individual market would raise administrative costs. In
addition, the savings from prevention, chronic disease management, and
reduced cost shifting cannot be achieved in a gap-ridden coverage
system. That's why - as Brookings scholar Henry Aaron has pointed out -
universal coverage is a necessary first step to bringing costs under
control.

7. It May Raise Taxes on Average Families Buying Health Insurance:
Current health care tax benefits grow with premiums (expected to be
about 6 percent a year). The McCain campaign has not released many
details of its health care plan, including how it would adjust the
health care credits over time. However, it is modeled off a Bush
Administration proposal that plan capped the growth of credits at the
rate of inflation (about 2 percent a year).

Click here to read the full analysis.
<http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/resource/> 

Click here to listen to the audio from today's call.
<http://images2.americanprogress.org/CAPAF/2008/042908.mp3> 

About the Center for American Progress Action Fund

The Center for American Progress Action Fund
<http://www.americanprogressaction.org/>  transforms progressive ideas
into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action,
grassroots organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other
progressive leaders throughout the country and the world. The Action
Fund is also the home of the Progress Report and ThinkProgress.

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20005-4707 United States

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