4/30/2008

John McCain Treats You Like You Are Rich:
So after you get home from working overtime so that you can make the mortgage or the rent this month, after making dinner for the kids around 7 or 8, later than they should be eating, but at least they are eating, even if it's whatever you exhaustingly microwave, after you, being a good parent, make sure the kids' homework has been done, after you try to squeeze in an hour of relaxation with a little bit of American Idol or sports before you fall asleep on the couch in front of the television, after you get a restless five or six hours of actual sleep because you can't stop thinking about which bills you can't pay this month, wondering if the cable or the phone will get cut off first, and which you can live without until the paycheck from your second job, the one you do on the weekends, comes in, after getting your kids up in the morning, making sure they have something that approaches breakfast, after you chug a cup of coffee and grab some toast or a banana to rush back to work so you can be on your feet for the next eight to ten hours, working through lunch because that adds to the overtime, wondering if you're ever going to have the time to spend with your kids and/or spouse, after you go to the grocery store and shake your head at the price of food, thinking maybe it'd be nice to give up your own breakfast for a couple of days so that you can buy the kids some ice cream, and after you get home to do it all over again, John McCain thinks you have the time to go through dozens upon dozens of health care plans and decide which ones you can afford, which ones you can't, which ones would be best for your family, and which ones won't treat you like shit.

And he's gonna give you a five grand tax credit for the privilege, which doesn't mean John McCain wants to give you five grand. No, it means you get to take that off your taxes. Which means it works out to, well, not even enough for you to go fuck yourself, let alone afford decent care. And by giving you the five grand tax credit, he's taking it away from employers so that they no longer have any incentive to give health insurance.

McCain's announcement of his health care plan yesterday was a goddamned insult, a gigantic shit taken on the working class. See, maybe John McCain, while tooling around in his wife's jet, might have time to have his assistants sort through thousands of pages of plans to narrow it down to three or four that might be amenable to the cranky bastard, but you and nearly every other American? It's like saying, "Oh, and by the way, grow your own food."

Mostly, it's not even a real "plan," in the sense that virtually nothing in it is a concrete, you know, plan. It's more like a plan to make a plan at some point after the planning stage is over. For instance, for the huge problem of pre-existing conditions, McCain says, "The details of a Guaranteed Access Plan will be worked out with the collaboration and consent of the states." In other words, "I don't fucking know what the fuck to do."

So health care under John McCain would basically be: "Here's a couple of tokens, kids. Have fun at the arcade for the next couple of decades."