Obama Surrogate: McCain Will Deregulate Health Care Like He Deregulated The Mortgage Industry
After knocking John McCain as a deregulator of the banking system during the recent financial crisis, Barack Obama’s campaign hit the Arizona senator Sunday for wanting to do the same to the health insurance industry.
“Nothing would be more precarious to Americans than losing their healthcare,” Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said on a conference call with reporters.
Sebelius linked healthcare to the recent financial crisis throughout the call, and suggested that McCain’s healthcare plan would lead to a similar crisis.
“As terrified as people are about the economic crisis that now faces this country, I don’t think any situation is as personal as health care,” Sebelius said. “John McCain would apply to the insurance industry what he did to the banking industry.”
Sebelius said McCain would “dismantle state based regulation and tie the hands of those involved in consumer protection.”
Apparently the left thinks that if they repeat the “deregulation” lie about the mortgage industry long enough it will start to be true. But the truth is, as I’ve pointed time and again, that the problem with the mortgage industry wasn’t deregulation. It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored entities, owning or securing 51% of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market. It was liberal policies like requiring Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac to buy up bad loans, such as loans made on low-value manufactured homes for up to 95% of the home’s purchase price.
In short, the problem with the mortgage industry was too much regulation.
And McCain’s plans for health care, which center around tax-incentives aimed at getting people to move off of government/employer health care plans and purchase their own plans, can hardly be called “deregulation.” Because adding new deductions to the tax code to promote a certain type of behavior is regulation. I’m not entirely sold on McCain’s plans myself, but I think he’s got his heart in the right place. In order for this country’s health care to be fixed we have got to end the third party pay system, whether that third party be employer-backed insurance or a government program.
Until people in this country feel, directly, the burden for their own health care choices prices are going to continue to spiral upward. That’s the simple truth, but Sebelius and Obama and the rest of the liberals would like the public to feel like they’re all a bunch of hapless victims with no hope for happiness and financial/health security without lots and lots of tax dollars spent on big government programs and regulations.
