McCain: I Have An Economic Plan, It’s Good (part 8)

McCain keeps showing the country his misunderstanding of the economy, free markets and regulation. The latest comes as McCain describes his free-market, deregulated approach to healthcare, when he said that the healthcare system should function just like the banking environment he helped create over the past decade. Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman summed it up best:

OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this. Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago—and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

By the time you read this, his campaign will have most likely spun this into some other message in the same way they took his “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” statement on 9/15/08 (the day Lehman & Merrill went down and AIG had to be bailed out) and re-shaped it to say “he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people.”

Right Mr. McCain, thank you for clarifying that for the 605,000 people of the American workforce who have lost their jobs through August.

The headline of this post was an actual quote from McCain in April. See the full interview here. We have since tracked the worst of his economic missteps and have a plan to keep doing so. It’s good.

Basis Point of Disclosure: The Basis Point editor supports Obama. Some of The Basis Point’s regular contributors support McCain.