McCain Busted: He Supports DE-regulation

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Registered: 09-08-2008
McCain Busted: He Supports DE-regulation
6
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 2:08am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/20/AR2008092001746.html?sid=ST2008092002241&s_pos=

McCain Health-Care Article Fuels New Clash Over Economy

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 21, 2008; Page A07

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 20 -- An article about health care published in an obscure journal led to a new skirmish Saturday between the campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain over who should be trusted with the ailing economy.

The article, which appeared under Sen. McCain's name, included a favorable reference to banking deregulation that, in light of this week's near-meltdown in the financial industry, provided an irresistible target for Sen. Obama's campaign and once again put McCain on the defensive. McCain's campaign accused Obama of manufacturing an attack by deliberately misreading the Republican's words.

The article was published in Contingencies magazine, which is produced under the auspices of the American Association of Actuaries. In it, McCain touted his plans for increasing competition in health care as one way to expand coverage and reduce costs.

McCain wrote, "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."

Obama, appearing at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., mocked his rival for sounding out of touch at a time when Washington is moving rapidly to re-regulate the financial industry to curb the excesses that put the system into near-paralysis in the past week.

"So let me get this straight -- he wants to run health care like they've been running Wall Street," Obama told the audience. "Well, Senator, I know some folks on Main Street who aren't going to think that's such a good idea."

The Obama campaign first learned of the McCain article when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman referenced it Friday night on his blog. Since then, officials in the campaign have spread its contents as quickly as possible.

McCain's campaign, caught off guard by the uproar caused by the article, called the criticism from Obama a red herring. What McCain was referring to, one of his advisers said, was the change in regulations that allowed banks to operate across state lines, thereby opening up more competition while providing easier access to services for consumers.

"This is absurd," McCain senior economics adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin wrote in an e-mail sent to reporters. "If Barack Obama thinks that today's financial troubles were caused by policies which allowed Americans to use an ATM anywhere in this country, then it is better that he continue to be silent about solutions to the crisis on Wall Street. That crisis arose from corruption and regulators asleep at the switch. It's also possible Senator Obama is simply a dishonest politician who will say anything to get himself elected and just isn't ready to be President."

Coming only a few days after McCain had defended the economy as "fundamentally strong" as the stock markets were plunging last Monday, however, this latest episode underscored anew the extent to which the economic crisis has put McCain on the defensive.

McCain moved immediately to deal with his comment about the economy's fundamental soundness, and over the next several days he pushed an increasingly populist message that emphasized the tough times Americans are facing and called for cracking down on corruption and greed on Wall Street.

Obama unloaded on McCain during appearances Saturday. He fired back at McCain for running ads linking him to former top executives of Fannie Mae, James A. Johnson and Franklin Raines. Johnson briefly headed up Obama's vice presidential search team but stepped aside when controversy arose over his role at Fannie Mae. Raines recently settled with the government after being tagged in a huge financial scandal at the mortgage financing institution.

Obama said he had met Raines only once and talked to him for about five minutes, denying that Raines played any real role in the campaign. Raines issued a statement this week saying he had not been an adviser to the campaign.

Instead, Obama cited comments by the former head of Fannie Mae's government relations office, who was quoted by Politico.com as saying, "When I see photographs of Sen. McCain's staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me."

"Folks," Obama told his audience in Daytona Beach, "you can't make this stuff up."

With millions of Americans worrying about their retirement security as federal officials rushed to stabilize the shaky financial system, Obama also seized on McCain's support for partial privatization of Social Security. He said McCain was prepared to gamble with people's life savings.

"If my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week," he said. "Millions would've watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes. Millions of families would've been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves."

The statement appeared to be a substantial exaggeration, and the McCain campaign quickly fired back.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds accused Obama of not telling the truth.

"John McCain is 100 percent committed to preserving Social Security benefits for seniors, and Barack Obama knows it," he said in an e-mail sent out while Obama was speaking. "This is a desperate attempt to gain political advantage using scare tactics and deceit."

Bounds pointed out that Obama has expressed support for government support for private accounts that would be an accompaniment to Social Security and said the senator's remarks were "a perfect demonstration of his willingness to ignore facts in favor of his own self-promotion."

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Registered: 09-08-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:28pm

http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/06/04/downward-spiral-health-insurance/

McCain’s Insurance Deregulation Scheme Promises A Downward Spiral In Health Care Coverage

»By Igor on Jun 4th, 2008 at 7:25 pm

Last night on CNN’s Larry King Live, Jamal Simmons, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), argued that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care plan would “do for the health care industry what the Republicans did for the credit card industry”:

Yes, what’s interesting about this and what we’re going to find out about John McCain is that John McCain was a neo-con before George Bush was a neo-con. He’s been friends with all these guys: Doug Feith, Bill Kristol, all these guys. You want to talk about health care? Johns McCain wants to do for the health care industry what the Republicans did for the credit card industry. They want to deregulate it and let people be able to choose their health care.

Watch It:

Indeed, as Robert Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, argues in a recent Slate article, deregulation of the credit card industry “offers a cautionary tale about a little-understood provision at the center of John McCain’s health care plan.”

Following a pair of Supreme Court decisions which deregulated the banking industry, credit card companies relocated to states with no interest rate caps and charged “what they wanted” to borrowers in states with interest rate limits. McCain’s reform takes a similar tact. He would allow health insurers to operate across state lines “without complying with the laws in the state in which they operate,” and permit insurance plans from out-of-state to lure away healthier patients.

As Gordon points out, insurance companies “would have little incentive to continue doing business” under certain state rules which “require that companies issue coverage to all new customers and not set higher rates for people who are already sick”:

, insurers wouldn’t even need to pick up and move their operations; it would be enough to file some paperwork with a state insurance commissioner and pay that state’s relevant taxes…An insurer operating under Arizona law would be able to offer healthy New Yorkers a cheaper policy than an insurer working under New York law that has to price policies the same for everyone.

If the deregulated environment allows credit card companies to “use pricing practices, like teaser rates, to attract cash-strapped families and then…double or triple those rates without notice,” Gordon argues that McCain’s approach to deregulating the health insurance industry would similarly permit insurance companies to deny coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions and “improve their own profits by offering targeted policies to people with the fewest health expenses”:

As with the history of credit cards, it’s Robin Hood in reverse. Apart from the obvious injustice, this approach could add to spiraling health costs. The sickest 10 percent of Americans are already responsible for 70 percent of the nation’s health expenses. When more such Americans go uninsured, skip checkups, and land in the emergency room, they end up costing taxpayers more.

Pre-existing conditions are not confined to chronic diseases. In fact, some individual insurance companies do not count a C-section as a pre-existing condition, and policies differ based on state laws and regulations. Under McCain’s proposal to free insurance companies from state regulations, insurers that continue to extend coverage to moms who have had a C-section would quickly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage with insurers that provide the least protection to new moms.

Thus, McCain’s deregulation scheme, like past banking reforms, seeks to extend industry profits, not consumer protections.

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Tue, 09-23-2008 - 12:25am

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=alfUj1r0Z10o&refer=politics

Obama, Not McCain, Shows Steady Hand in Crisis: Albert R. Hunt

Commentary by Albert R. Hunt

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- For the first time since 1932 a presidential election is taking place in the midst of a genuine financial crisis. The reaction of the candidates was revealing.

John McCain, railing against the ``greed and corruption'' of Wall Street, won the first round of the sound-bite war. He came out with a television commercial on the ``crisis'' early on Monday of last week, and over the next three days gave more than a dozen broadcast interviews. He and running mate Sarah Palin would reform Wall Street and regulate the nefarious fat cats that caused this fiasco.

It was a great start. It then went downhill as he stumbled over his record of championing deregulation, claimed the economy was fundamentally strong, and flip-flopped over the government takeover of American International Group Inc.

For his part, Barack Obama didn't come across as passionately outraged and wasn't as omnipresent or as specific.

More revealing, though, was to whom both candidates turned on that panic-ridden morning of Sept. 15, and how the messages evolved before and after that day.

McCain called Martin Feldstein, the well-known Republican economist and Reagan administration adviser, John Taylor of Stanford University, who served in President George W. Bush's Treasury and Carly Fiorina, once the chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Co.

Obama called former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

It was a mismatch.

Towering Volcker

Feldstein, for all his intellect, was ineffective in the Reagan administration; then-White House deputy chief of staffDick Darman cut him out of important action. Volcker, first at the Treasury and then as chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a towering figure in every way.

Taylor is a well-regarded academic. In four years as undersecretary of the Treasury, he left few footprints. Summers, as both deputy secretary and secretary, left a lot.

Fiorina is smart and quick; to put it charitably, Rubin will forget more about financial markets than she'll ever know.

When it comes to governance, and either Democrat Obama or Republican McCain will inherit this miserable financial mess, the best guide is who they talked to, what they said, where they've been, and how knowledgeable they are.

Obama's record and earlier speeches belie some of his more populist rhetoric. Yet they also suggest, as do his advisers, a much more activist government role than is likely under a McCain-Palin administration.

Comfortable With Subject

Obama called for the overhaul of the financial-regulatory system and tougher enforcement well before this past week's traumas.

Detached observers who watched him last week, especially in a Bloomberg Television interview, were taken by how conversant and comfortable he was on the subject, despite his thin record. Few detached observers came away with that impression watching the Arizona senator.

Much of the re-regulatory fever focuses on the Federal Reserve and any new agencies created to clean up the fiasco. Central, however, will be a more vigorous Securities and Exchange Commission, or whatever holds that investor-protection function.

McCain displayed a sudden interest in the SEC last week when he demanded that Chairman Chris Cox be fired. When his campaign was asked if the senator had ever criticized the current commission's performance before, they failed to respond.

All For Obama

Tellingly, three former SEC chairmen, a Democrat, Arthur Levitt, and two Republicans, David Ruder and Bill Donaldson, have endorsed Obama. Levitt is a board member of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

Donaldson, who was tapped by Bush to head the SEC, says Obama called him last year about the financial-regulatory problems. He has never heard from McCain.

``Obama has been talking about the need for better financial regulation well before this crisis hit and has done some real thinking about it,'' says Donaldson, a lifelong Republican. ``McCain comes across as someone who suddenly realized changes have to be made.''

There is a case for McCain: it's if you believe in less regulation, that the government should get out of the way and let the markets work their will.

No `Real Understanding'

``I don't think anyone who wants to increase the burden of government regulation and high taxes has any real understanding of economics,'' McCain said this spring at an Inez, Kentucky, town hall meeting, where he also declared ``the fundamentals of our economy are good.''

Until recently, he repeatedly invoked Ronald Reagan's calls for less regulation. He voted for the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance regulations -- then last year said he regretted that vote.

McCain isn't averse to some regulations. He has strongly championed a greater federal role in campaign finance, tobacco and boxing. In each case, he saw a clear villain -- special- interest money, a tobacco product that puts profits ahead of lives, and unscrupulous boxing promoters.

There has been little evidence that prior to last week he ever put financial firms in this category. Although he assailed excessive corporate compensation last week, McCain has opposed a tepid House-passed bill that would give corporate shareholders the right to cast a non-binding vote on compensation of top executives.

Turning to Gramm

The person he has turned to most for counsel on such matters is his ex-Senate colleague Phil Gramm. Gramm is a political Gordon Gekko, a brainy economist with a Darwinian view of markets and public policy.

It's not easy to remember what the financial world looked like 10 days ago much less 10 months ago. Decisions that will be reached after this election will be the most important since the 1930s.

Obama, as more than a few Democrats are complaining, hasn't been as quick, sharp -- or demagogic -- as they would like. McCain has been beset by deeper difficulties: an inchoate and inconsistent message that seems to reflect political exigencies more than principled convictions.

On the financial crisis, last week belonged to Obama.

(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 21, 2008 09:33 EDT


iVillage Member
Registered: 09-21-2008
Tue, 09-23-2008 - 12:53am
McCain '08
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Tue, 09-23-2008 - 12:57am
At least I didn't say that Bush43=McCain. This time...:)

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Registered: 07-16-2008
Tue, 09-23-2008 - 12:58am

It's my late night "game."

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iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Tue, 09-23-2008 - 1:03am

((It's my late night "game." Read what you wrote, then scroll down while holding my breath to see if I see "McCain '08" in giant red letters.))

lol. This board is never boring-very entertaining. lol.