Seems that a lot of people are getting tired of political discussion for McCain. Might I advocate (not to be disrespectful of nursing link) that nurses who want to be productive in these last 5 days of the campaigns, that a viit be made to www.nurses4mccain.com/ some time?  Annie

"Too Audacious to Be Believed"

In an editorial critical of the Obama plan, Joseph R. Antos, PhD, a scholar in healthcare and retirement policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, DC, says that the Obama plan is "too audacious to be believed."

"The Obama plan offers a host of policy proposals that, in the main, address the symptoms but not the underlying disease that afflicts the health care system," Dr. Antos writes. "We surely could use some symptomatic relief. However, failing to address the perverse incentives that drive health care spending

inexorably upward, making insurance unaffordable for millions and shaping (or misshaping) the practice of medicine, will leave us worse off than we are today."

The "perverse incentives" Dr. Antos refers to include a "play or pay" option, similar to that currently in place in Massachusetts, under which employers that do not provide health insurance coverage pay a per-worker surcharge that is used to finance a publicly funded healthcare system.

"A play-or-pay policy probably would not be effective in expanding employer-sponsored insurance," Dr. Antos writes. "Employers who already offer generous health benefits would not have to change their compensation structure. Other employers would choose to 'pay' rather than 'play' unless the new tax were more expensive than the cost of paying the mandated amount for insurance, which is politically implausible."

Dr. Antos also claims that the non–group insurance plans offered to uninsured families under Sen. Obama's plan must of necessity either offer a wide range of benefits and be costly or offer more narrow but less costly basic plans with high out-of-pocket costs.

"A generous plan requires premiums that would be unaffordable to many of the uninsured unless there was also a generous subsidy from taxpayers," he writes. "A more basic plan would have more affordable premiums, but beneficiaries would face higher out-of-pocket costs if they became seriously ill. Lower premiums and skimpier benefits are not what the Democratic political base thinks it has been offered."

The author is also critical of the Democrat's proposed health insurance exchange, saying that it would limit the market-based competition, and adds that Sen. Obama's plan to regulate health insurers more closely "substantially increases the risk of government failure and regulatory gridlock."