John Goodman is a health care expert from a conservative policy think-tank and was an adviser who wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this June for the McCain campaign. Now they disavow him, though his views are unexceptional in conservative policy circles.
I’ll note also that treating somebody via the emergency room tends to be more expensive than routine preventative care. So traditional pocketbook conservatives may not like this point of view either. But the Dwight Eisenhowers, John Andersons and Bob Doles of the Republican party are a vanishing breed.
While we’re on the subject of health care: here’s a summary graph from the Urban-Brookings tax policy center. The McCain plan involves reducing employer-paid group health insurance in favor of individual policy plans. The number of uninsured are roughly unaffected.
The Obama plan reduces the uninsured pool by about half. That’s my eyeballing of the chart: those interested can check out an analysis of the 2 candidate’s tax plans, which I have not looked at.
OK, he’s not an idiot, he’s merely an imbecile. People with his mentality are clueless and dangerous. To equate access to health care with emergency room treatment is like saying after the Katrina disaster, “Those people aren’t homeless, they’re living in the Superdome.”
