McCain Calls for Federal Money in Health Care

Mr. McCain said that his plan would foster increased competition that would in turn lead to lower costs. “Insurance companies could no longer take your business for granted, offering narrow plans with escalating costs,” he said.

Some health care experts question whether those tax credits would offer enough money to pay for new health insurance plans. The average cost of an employer-funded insurance plan is $12,106 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group. Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research organization financed by foundations and government agencies, said, “For a lot of people, the tax credits he’s talking about would not be enough to afford coverage.”

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said he believed that many employers would still offer health insurance to try to attract the best workers, and that other companies would use the money they save on health insurance to offer people better wages, which have stagnated as many businesses have struggled to keep up with skyrocketing healthcare costs. And he said the plan would transform the current health insurance market, and make it cheaper.

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Mr. McCain also wants to let people buy insurance from companies in other states, so they could shop for cheaper plans. That could lead some insurers to relocate from highly regulated states to states that would allow them to cover fewer services.

Both Democratic presidential candidates sharply criticized Mr. McCain’s proposal, with Mrs. Clinton calling it “a radical plan that would mean millions of Americans would lose their job-based coverage.” And Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, described Mr. McCain’s plan as “a tax break that won’t guarantee coverage and doesn’t ensure that health care is affordable for the working families who need it most.”

Jonathan B. Oberlander, an authority on health policy and politics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the differences between the two parties could not be starker. “You have one party saying we have to transform the health care system by regulating the insurance industry,” he said, “and the other party saying we have to transform the health care system by deregulating the insurance industry.”

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

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