The Wonk Room

McCain’s Healthcare Plan: ‘Guaranteed’ Empty Rhetoric

Yesterday, former Hewlett Packard CEO and McCain campaign surrogate Carly Fiorina had an enlightening interview with BlogHer touching on John McCain’s healthcare plan.

We’re all familiar with the rhetoric that is McCain’s proposal. When asked exactly how McCain would ensure that people, particularly children, were able to get healthcare, she had an answer we’ve never heard before: “guaranteed access.” Fiorina said:

[T]he combination of guaranteed access, tax credits, and a set of health care and health insurance options that are more affordable and more accessible will ensure that children have access to both health insurance and health care.

Listen to it:

Fiorina’s answer came in a question about children’s health care — namely, how would McCain ensure that parents use his tax break to pay for their children’s health insurance rather? Fiorina replied with particularly peculiar circular logic: McCain’s plan has “guaranteed access.”

Yet there’s nothing “guaranteed” about McCain’s health care plan. First, it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for people with preexisting conditions — including Sen. McCain himself, a cancer survivor — to obtain health insurance. Second, it would dismantle the system through which the vast majority of working Americans — and their families — get health coverage today, by ending employer-based insurance.

In fact, McCain’s vote against expanding SCHIP ensured that more children would be denied the very “guarantee access” the program promises. BlogHer should have asked McCain how he would guarantee access for uninsured American children whose parents are forced to decide between purchasing a private health insurance plan and paying off an inflated mortgage that keeps their child out of a homeless shelter.

Sorry, Carly. “Guaranteed access” is nothing more than empty health care rhetoric, like the rest of McCain’s health care plan.