Political Football

Link

Yesterday, I referred to the “dishonest, but facially highly effective, ads” Barack Obama has employed against John McCain. The most persistent of these dishonest ads, at least in the Northern Virginia area, pertain to McCain’s health care plan. They follow the line taken by Lyin’ Joe Biden in his debate with Sarah Palin, where Biden claimed that McCain’s plan effectively gives Americans $5,000 and then takes away $12,000.

Yuval Levin, in the Weekly Standard, has exposed the multiple liberties Obama-Biden have taken with the truth on this subject:

Senators Obama and Biden both mentioned the taxation of health benefits in recent debates, and their campaign has run ads pointing to it as well, but all have failed to note the tax credit that more than makes up for it. The net tax burden on middle class families declines under the McCain plan, while insurance options improve. If they do mention the tax credit, they suggest it is all that families would have if they left their employer coverage–as Joe Biden put it in his debate with Sarah Palin, you would have to “replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company.” But that ignores the simple fact that employer-purchased health care is purchased with employee wages. Right now, employers pay workers less in cash wages because they pay so much in premiums. With McCain’s reform, workers who opt out of coverage will get more take home pay and a tax credit to more than make up for lost employer contributions to health care.But perhaps the most dishonest charge concerns the prospects for the employer-based system itself. The Obama campaign has implied that McCain’s plan would unravel the system and cause workers to be dropped from their employers’ health plans. “Twenty million of you will be dropped,” Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate. In fact, the McCain plan does not alter the basic financial incentives facing employers. Workers might choose to leave employer coverage, but the McCain plan would not force them out.

Indeed, it is Barack Obama’s health care plan that raises the prospect of masses being dropped from the employer-based insurance system, and his vulnerability on this crucial front may explain some of his intense defensiveness on health care. In the second presidential debate, Obama sought to address this concern through a brazenly misleading depiction of his own plan. “If you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it,” he said. “All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it.” But you can only keep your plan if your employer doesn’t eliminate it, and Obama’s health care proposal, unlike John McCain’s, gives your employer a powerful incentive to do just that.

Where McCain seeks to address the problems of our health insurance system by building a market for private individuals, Obama seeks to do so by building a public-insurance system. His plan would force all but the very smallest businesses to either provide insurance coverage that meets the plan’s requirements (which the Obama campaign has not specified, but would surely involve extensive particular coverage mandates like those in the federal employee health plan, which exceed what most popular employee plans provide today), or pay a tax to the government. Many employers would thus face the choice of increasing their insurance costs to comply with the new coverage requirements or dropping their workers’ coverage. Obama, meanwhile, would create a new government-run insurance program (funded by the new tax on employers who don’t offer coverage) that would compete with private companies to cover people who are not insured by employers.

In effect, the Obama plan creates an incentive to drop employees from existing plans, and then takes private insurers out of the race to cover them by using price controls to make the public option cheaper. The plan’s goal is to drive Americans into a public Medicare-like insurance system by default.

Unfortunately, Obama’s dishonest attacks on McCain’s plan are perfect for use by an unscrupulous politician in a negative ad. For although McCain’s health care plan isn’t terribly complex, it can’t be explained effectively in 30 seconds. For that reason and because, in any event, McCain lacks the resources to air the truth about his plan with anything like the frequency that Obama is able to tell falsehoods about it, the Obama attack has gone unanswered.

This disparity in the candidates’ resources points to perhaps the greatest irony of this campaign: Obama’s ability to misrepresent facts about substantive issues largely without response is predicated on another Obama falsehood — his promise that, if his opponent agreed to do the same (as McCain did), he would finance his campaign through public funding.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed