McCranky has the gall to pass off his hare-brained "market-based" gibberish as a health-care plan. Maybe we should be calling him McBullshit?

"McCain's prescription would seek to lure workers away from their company health plans with a $5,000 family tax credit and a promise that, left to their own devices, they would be able to find cheaper insurance that is more tailored to their health-care needs and not tied to a particular job."
--reporter Michael D. Shear, in today's Washington Post

So, really, the only question is whether McCranky is too stupid to understand that no "market-based" approach can even begin to address the health-care crisis, for the screechingly obvious reason that the "market" has less-than-zero incentive to address the needs of anyone except healthy people, who by definition aren't party to the health-care crisis (at least not yet), or he's just running a little con game.

(Hypothetical Crankyman: "Everybody says I gotta have a health-care plan but I don't wanna have no health-care plan and nobody can make me have a health-care plan. Luckily American voters are really, really stupid, so I'll just sling 'em a line of bullshit.")

A number of people have pointed out that members of Congress (both houses) are in one important way uniquely un-qualified to have an opinion on health-care costs, because of the sweet plan that comes with their job. Of course in McCranky's case it's even worse: Thanks to his foresight in dumping his previous wife in favor of the lovely Cindy with her beer-heiress fortune, as long as people are still drinking beer the McCrankys won't have to worry where their next aspirin (or, more likely, designer prescription pain-killer) is coming from.

I'm not even going to bother quoting any more of the WaPo piece, which dutifully passes on all the McCranky health-care bullshit as if it were serious discussion. Well, maybe I'll offer just this additional bit:

McCain's plan is aimed primarily at giving individuals the power to make health-care decisions by granting the same tax breaks for insurance whether workers get a policy from an employer or on their own. Aides call it a "radical" rethinking of health care that would drive costs down and give people more choice.

If you really have the stomach for such insulting nonsense, by all means follow the article link above. It's a shame that so-called journalists have resolutely narrowed their job description to passing on whatever nonsense they're fed--all with a straight face, with no attempt at reality-checking the crap, except of course getting a comment from the other party in a "he said-he said" squabble.

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