{"id":726,"date":"2008-10-18T23:11:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-19T03:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=726"},"modified":"2008-10-18T23:11:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-19T03:11:00","slug":"nejm-primum-non-nocere-the-mccain-plan-for-health-insecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=726","title":{"rendered":"NEJM &#8212; Primum Non Nocere &#8212; The McCain Plan for Health Insecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/359\/16\/1645\">NEJM &#8212; Primum Non Nocere &#8212; The McCain Plan for Health Insecurity<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;By this standard, John McCain emerges not as a maverick or centrist but as a radical social conservative firmly in the grip of the ideology that animates the domestic policies of President George W. Bush. The central purpose of President Bush&#8217;s health policy, and John McCain&#8217;s, is to reduce the role of insurance and make Americans pay a larger part of their health care bills out of pocket. Their embrace of market forces, fierce antagonism toward government, and determination to force individuals to have more &#8216;skin in the game&#8217; are overriding \u2014 all other goals are subsidiary. Indeed, the Republican commitment to market-oriented reforms is so strong that, to attain their vision, Bush and McCain seem willing to take huge risks with the efficiency, equity, and stability of our health care system. Specifically, the McCain plan would profoundly threaten the current system of employer-sponsored insurance on which more than three fifths of Americans depend, increase reliance on unregulated individual insurance markets (which are notoriously inefficient), and leave the number of uninsured Americans virtually unchanged. A side effect of the McCain plan would be to threaten access to adequate insurance for millions of America&#8217;s sickest citizens.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">As I&#8217;ve said elsewhere, I believe McCain&#8217;s plan would blow up the current system fairly quickly and lead us to our much needed national debate on how we <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">really<\/span> want to do this, but the cost in every other way is too high to risk.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEJM &#8212; Primum Non Nocere &#8212; The McCain Plan for Health Insecurity: &#8220;By this standard, John McCain emerges not as a maverick or centrist but as a radical social conservative &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=726\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;NEJM &#8212; Primum Non Nocere &#8212; The McCain Plan for Health Insecurity&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,27,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-healthcare","category-health-insurance-cost","category-money-and-politics"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}