No Responses to “Palin In A Bikini. For Real.”

1. Delray

   That’s not a bikini….lol.

   9:37 AM on 9/29/08
2. RacerX

   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?

   These are changes that will set in motion nothing less
   than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage
   that protects most American families.

   A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia,
   Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million
   Americans who have employment-based health insurance
   would lose it under the McCain plan.

   There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-
   reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much
   attention because the chatter in this campaign has
   mostly been about nonsense – lipstick, celebrities and
   “Drill, baby, drill!”

   For starters, 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,” said Sherry Glied, an
   economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy
   and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School
   of Public Health.

   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, the equivalent of injecting poison
   into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.

   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.

   This entire McCain health insurance transformation is
   right out of the right-wing Republicans’ ideological
   playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and
   send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.

   You would think that with some of the most venerable
   houses on Wall Street crumbling like sand castles right
   before our eyes, we’d be a little wary about spreading
   this toxic formula even further into the health care
   system.

   But we’re not even paying much attention.

   2:45 PM on 9/29/08
3. Bunny With Fangs!» Blog Archive » JLo’s Weird Face Brings The Links

   [...] Sarah Palin is in a bikini. For reals this time… [The News Junkie] [...]

   10:49 PM on 9/29/08
4. Peeved Guy

   Way to stay on topic.

   We’re about to take one giant step toward socialism with the bailout, might as well go all in and give Obamas healthcare plan a go. In for a penny in for a pound.

   12:43 AM on 9/30/08