I got anti-biotics today. I have strep. Not in my throat but in my ears and eyes. It's horrible. And I'm highly contagious. There is not enough Oil of Oregano in the world to fix me, I have to resort to the bad stuff. My eyes feel like sandpaper, it's painful! But I used my husbands work medical plan. All-in-all I paid $10 for all the assortment of Dr's visit, antibiotic, eye drops and ear drops to kill this crap. Eventually I might have had hearing loss or it would have hurt my sight.

I'm at Curezone because I hate western medicine. But I am not going to mess around with my sight or hearing.

It got me thinking about McCain and Pallans idea for American's Medical Plans. Here it is, in a nutshell:
Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?


The whole thing is about employer-based coverage that protects most Americans. They have projected that 20 million Americans who have this kind of coverage would lose it under the McCain plain.

The McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.

"It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money." This statement was from Sherry Glied, who chairs the Dept of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University.

Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.

According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”

The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”

Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.

While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used “to help pay for your health care.”

You may think this is a good move or a bad one — but it’s a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?

The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, it's the beginning of the end of every American that get's medical insurance. It's the death knoll bell.

When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.

That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.

The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”

Yet another radical element of McCain’s plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless.

In a refrain we’ve heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these “needless and costly” INSURANCE REGULATIONS.....OMG

This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the Home Mortgage Crisis.....deregulation gone wild.

Are you paying attention to this???? We’re not even paying much attention. Please pay attention!!!!!