A stern male voice reads the description of McCain’s plan and then a light soothing female voice takes over to describe the wonderful Obama plan

It makes the McCain plan sound like a rip off

Meanwhile, Michigan is a state that taxes the insurnace preiums paid by employers. If an employer wants to upgrade the insurance he provides, his state tax increases accordingly

just stop to think that the left will always count people who ELECT NOT TO HAVE OR PAY FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT.

Read this post »…

ernesto on October 6, 2008 at 11:37 AM

So you are admitting that you endorse telling lies about your opponents?

Another lie in this ad (or maybe it’s just an indelicate misdirection) is when the ad tries to make an issue of the check going to the insurance company instead of to the individual.

***

MarkTheGreat on October 6, 2008 at 11:34 AM

Obama’s ad is so fricking confusing that it’s hard to decide where to pick it apart. As far as the point about the check going to the insurance company, I see two points.

If you are an employee working for an employer who has a group health plan (and, hence, the employer necessarily pays the premium on your behalf), the money is going to the insurance company anyway–as it should. McCain’s $5,000 tax credit then is used on your tax return to offset the increased tax liability that you’ll incur from including your health insurance premiums paid by the employer in your taxable income.

I think there’s an additional benefit to the McCain plan. If his credit exceeds your tax liability attributable to including the employer-paid premiums in income, I think that excess credit gets directed to a health savings account (HSA). If that’s the check going to the insurance company, I guess I say, “So what?” I believe that’s a way to toss the money into a tax-deferred savings account from which other expenses can be paid. It’s a bit of forced savings for medical expenses. Dems like regulation, so what’s their objection? Now they’re free marketers? Oy.

Second, if you’re self-employed, and you pay your own premiums, I don’t understand the Obama point about the check going to the insurance company. Yes, you pay premiums, so money does go to the insurance company. How does Obama expect self-employeds to purchase health insurance? Mental telepathy? Again, however, I guess the Dems are raising the same bogus objection to the excess credit going to the HSA maintained by an insurance company–as discussed above. The free-market Dems, I suppose, want taxpayers to have the excess credit be paid to the taxpayers so that they can buy extra pork rinds and X-Box games.

Seriously, talk about distracting the public. Obama and Biden are lying so much about McCain’s play that it’s impossible to compare it to Obama’s plan. Heck, I haven’t seen a succinct description of Obama’s plan.

McCain should shove their lies up Obama’s a** tomorrow night in the debate. It’s one thing to debate the merits of the candidates’ proposals. But Obama and Biden are buying precious time grossly misrepresenting McCain’s proposals. Obama and Biden aren’t offering differing reasonable interpretations of McCain’s plan; they’re lying about it. And they’re lying about it because health care is a women’s issue, and they’re banking on confusing high-school educated women into believeing McCain’s going to flush their health-care insurance down the drain–whether that’s true or not.

Get some stones, McCain, and defend yourself. Have Palin explain an illustration using one of the two tax returns that she just released. A before and after summary. Women will believe Palin on this issue.

Biden is a master at this same game of loss if they are not elected again. The elderly will loose their pension, women will lose the right to murder their children, anyone that can’t take care of themselves, or are used to not working for a living will starve, freeze and be exterminated if the Republicans get in. The old shill of how he will take care of you, when in fact he will ignore you and just wants the job, the money and the power.

Personally, I’m trying to figure out where things are broken to the point that you need to change the financing part of healthcare in the way McCain thinks it ought to go.

We have to deal with our insurance company on nearly a daily basis, because we have two health care plans in the family — PPO (Pacificare) and HMO (Kaiser). The PPO refuses to pay its own doctors and laboratories for services unless we first “bill” Kaiser as primary. It’s our job to “bill” Kaiser. Kaiser has a rule that unless we use its facilities (or it’s an emergency), it won’t pay anything. Pacificare knows this, and didn’t require us to do anything until two years ago, when, without announcement, they changed the rules. We still have Pacificare doctors complaining to us about how slow our insurance is in paying; we have to remind them that THEY signed a contract with Pacificare, and are obligated to take only what Pacificare pays them, when Pacificare pays them. Some Pacificare doctors accept this, others don’t, pointing out that we are liable for payment if Pacificare doesn’t.

This has improved somewhat since I complained to my company’s HR people about what Pacificare was doing; they managed to get a accounts manager from Pacificare — and not one from India either — on the line. But if I didn’t have the company to bat for me, we would have been at 120 days payment for some stuff, and in collections.

My point: if the company acts as an intermediary, I’m assured of an ombudsman if things go wrong, because there are two of us (myself and the company) invested in the health plan. If I have to go it alone, experience shows that the insurance company will try to screw me.

that simply illustrates just how far the entire stinking industry has strayed from free market principles — something John would like to correct and yet duh1 has NO intention of doing — which is, frankly, bad for you [!]

we want to model the regulatory environment of health insurance on the regulatory environment of the banking and finance sectors.

that is a GUARANTEED loser in a short debate exchange. you wont see mccain bring it up, and if he does, you wont see obama even bother to defend his own plan, because he wont have to. the sound byte is too damning for mccain to use healthcare as an attack line

/sarc

What’s wrong with that? Except for those who planned on not buying insurance with the money.

The point that Obama is trying to slip in is that the check directly to the company won’t benefit the individual.

Biden lied during the debate about the health care numbers. He treated McCain’s tax credit as a mere tax deduction. They are completely different tax policy concepts, and the difference makes all the difference in the world. And the greatest problem is that lies like this torpedo the warranted debate about what really is the better plan.

I’ve thought Biden is a douche too many times in the past. But he’s such a liar that GOP pols should stop giving Biden a pass and call him out for the charlatan that he is. He’s pondscum.

I wanted to have a routine, yearly physical, so I called around to local doctor’s offices to find out how much they would charge. They kept asking me what insurance I had. I kept saying, “I don’t have insurance I plan to pay with cash.” Not a single one of the 6 places I checked with could tell me how much it would cost out of pocket. They could tell me my copay with Aetna or with Blue Cross, but had no idea what the entire cost was.

Now, that might be an exception (a problem unique to the Santa Monica area), but, when I looked online, it seemed people in other regions were having the same trouble. The system is stacked in favor of people either having employer provided insurance, state provided insurance or going to free clinics. There’s no longer a concept of routine care being something that people just budget for.

They would rather frighten people away from a fundamental reform of the structure of health insurance [Insert Topic Of Choice Here] for their own purposes.

Ed, I think that statement sums up the entirety of the Democratic platform.