Lex Luz

Obama or McCain: Who’s Better for Healthcare Investors?

Interesting article - thanks for the side-by-side comparison.

Alas, this article further deepens my belief that after so many decades of choosing between the lesser of two evils, finally this time around we have a REAL choice. Unfortunately, it's the choice between disaster and calamity.

Obama's plan strikes me as disastrous; an invitation to extraordinary waste and corruption and a continued rapid rise in prices for healthcare based on the introduction of a bloated bureaucracy and a "two-tier" medical insurance system that will gradually but inexorably suck more people into the morass of the publicly-funded system.

McCain's plan strikes me as utterly calamitous as it is tailor-made to relieve employers of the burden of providing a health insurance benefit. This will drive insurance premiums for individuals so far through the roof that a $5,000 tax credit will hardly start the motor toward recovery from the family's financial shock. The end result of this is that vastly more people will go without insurance and costs will rise farther, faster. Uninsured people get sicker faster and depend on emergency rooms - the highest-cost option available - for their primary care. They can't shoulder those bills, so guess who does? People carrying private insurance.

So, disaster on one hand, calamity on the other. Nice choice.

The REAL solution, in my view, is simply to eliminate health "insurance" (it isn't truly insurance anyway in the real sense of the term) altogether and let actual, honest free-market mechanisms drive innovation up and costs down, thereby expanding access and quality. Since that will never happen given where we are today, we need more compelling plans than either one of these two candidates is offering.