John McCain Is Not Qualified to Be President

Paul Krugman writes:

McCain on banking and health: OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading 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!

Comments

[stewart]

Given the costs of healthcare in the US compared to other more regulated regions, and the fate of the US markets, I'd agree with McCain that the effects of deregulation in both will be similar - good fr the executives in the industry, bad for everyone else.

[john]

Unbelievable, that any thinking person would vote for him. (If you're a millenarian or some such, believable that you'd vote for Sarah Palin.) The incompetence, ignorance, and mendacity of McCain and the Republicans has to be the worst ever displayed by anyone or any party who has been one of the top two candidates for President since, well, since... any suggestions?

Unfortunately, "2000" comes to mind, but this seems even worse, not only because there's a crisis now and there wasn't then.

[Ken Houghton]

"and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!"

Well, he's not wrong about THAT.

[The fastest growing municipality was Las Vegas]

Who will represent the tax payers in the upcoming bail-out negotiations? Congress generally is compromised. There are a lot of moderate Republicans, now called Democrats, that accepted pay-offs (campaign contributions) from the industry that lost more money than it ever made.

I would nominate for the tax payer representatives, Volcker, Shiller, Roubini, Buffett, and a couple of others only. Let's get guys in there that have been on the whole right the last few years.