by Damozel |
Check out Bill Maher's interview of Krugman....and now Krugman's proof that McCain's recent conversion from anti-accountability principles dates back, oh, about a week, let's say. In fact,, McCain was just proposing to do to the health care system what Wall Street has just done to the financial system.
Krugman cites this.
Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:
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.
So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry! (Krugman; emphasis added)
As Digby says, the article was written within the last month, while McCain was "a free-market fundamentalist, or at least taking his cues from such.
[T]here 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. (Hullabaloo)
There have been plenty of comments John McCain has made over the course of the campaign, which he now regrets. Admitting he doesn't understand the economy certainly ranks right up there; calling Social Security a "disgrace" has to be in the top five; and his dismissal of those who seek national office after a short time as a governor certainly looks embarrassing. But this is a real doozy
The Jed Report points out that Obama has long been advocating greater regulation of the industry.
[O]ne year ago Barack Obama proposed new regulations that would have prevented the mortgage crisis that led to the situation we find ourselves in today.... Specifically, Obama proposed a three step-solution: (1) more disclosure and accountability in housing market; (2) more oversight on ratings agencies; and (3) increase transparency across the board.
And in March, Obama spoke at Cooper Union in New York, delivering a critique of the push for deregulation championed by John McCain.
The evolution of industries often warrants regulatory reform to foster competition, lower prices or replace outdated oversight structures. Old institutions cannot adequately oversee new practices. Old rules may not fit the roads where our economy is leading. So there were good arguments for changing the rules of the road in the 1990s. Our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift, carried along by the swift currents of technological change and globalization. For the sake of our common prosperity, we needed to adapt to keep markets competitive and fair. Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one, aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight.
....And more importantly, while John McCain has been wrong, Barack Obama has been right.
Kleiman says the one thing that can't be repeated too often: "This is not a serious candidate for President."
But why stop with destroying both the financial system and the health care system? He's got Social Security in his sights as well!
McCain's health care plans don't kill you, and you live to a ripe old age, his plans for Social Security will make you wish you were dead.
McCain came under fire on Friday from defenders of the current Social Security system after his aides signaled to the Associated Press that the current market turmoil has not altered his support for changing the retirement program to allow individuals to invest some portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds.
"His midnight conversion from aggressive deregulator to market critic is apparently incomplete," said Jared Bernstein, the senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
"He still wants to privatize Social Security to subject retirees to the possibility of this kind of market turmoil, "he added. "Imagine what this would have meant to those in the cohort unlucky enough to reach retirement age in a market climate like this one." (DownWithTyranny)
That’s right kids, just like he wants to privatize social security in order for the retirement of seniors to be subjected to the gyrations we’ve seen on Wall Street, John McCain thinks we ought to make the health care system even worse by imitating the banking meltdown
The Anonymous Liberal points out that in a rational world---which I envision as one in which Bush could never have been elected--- the paragraph cited by Krugman "would be the nail in the coffin of John McCain's candidacy."
Jeff Fecke has an AWESOME idea.
Needless to say, I support McCain here. Because if we run health care like banking, then in a decade or so, the industry will completely melt down, forcing the federal government to nationalize it, leading to national health care at last. It’s so crazy it just might work! And in the meantime, it would be awesome, because we’d be free of bureaucrats and high fees in the health care industry — just like we are right now. (Alas, a Blog)
Maybe Fecke's onto something. Mark Kleiman writes:
I spent last weekend with a group including a brilliant conservative health policy wonk, who argued that the virtue of the McCain plan was that it would so wreck the existing system as to create the crisis required for a move toward single-payer. (The RBC)
Oh, and Anonymous Liberal said it too:
[I]f we bring the same approach to health care that we brought to the banking industry, maybe in eight years or so, our health care system will completely collapse and the government will have to step in and take over. Voila! A national health care system. Brilliant.
TPM: "If the Obama folks are smart -- and they are -- they'll ride this one all the way to the election."
Finally a word from The Wonk Room on McCain personal history regarding deregulation and anti-whining McCain advisor Phil Gramm:
... McCain voted for the bill that deregulated Wall St. and allowed such “reckless conduct” to occur in the first place. And one of the bill’s architects was McCain economic adviser, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX).
In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which abolished “all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat.” Specifically, this act “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies.”
Yesterday, a group of economists, including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, slammed Gramm for having a “mentality that doesn’t understand the nature of systemic risks in financial systems,” and said that his bill helped create the current financial turmoil
More buzz at Memeorandum.
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