In 2006, 11.7% of children, or 8.7 million kids, went without health insurance. That's up from the previous year, when 10.9%, or 8 million children, were uninsured.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica Smith. “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006,” United States Census Bureau. August 2007. Available from: http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-233.pdf
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The Congressional Budget Office reports the main factor in the rising cost of Medicare is the growth of health care costs—health expenditures as a percent of GDP have more than doubled since 1970, growing from 7.0 percent to 14.8 percent in 2002.
Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan prohibits the federal government's ability to negotiate drug prices--costing the government an estimated $90 billion annually.
The Bush Administration’s privatized “Medicare Advantage” plans are rising twice as fast as costs in traditional Medicare, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
McCain’s plan will sink anyone with a pre-existing condition. Plenty of families won’t be able to obtain health coverage at any price, since the McCain plan offers no protection for those with pre-existing conditions. That will allow insurers to refuse to cover an estimated 56 million people who have preexisting conditions such as cancer or diabetes
Two studies found that about half of families facing foreclosure reported that their financial difficulties were caused by health care issues such as unmanageable medical bills or missing work due to a medical problem.
McCain’s health plan will hit families with a huge new tax. Currently, employer-provided health care benefits are tax exempt, a longstanding policy that has saved families thousands of dollars and helped keep health care costs from spiraling out of control. McCain has promised to eliminate this tax break, a move that could add over $1,100 to the average family’s tax bill by 2013.
The tax credit McCain claims will offset this new burden would rise only at the rate of inflation—not the rate of health care costs, which grow much more quickly—so that by 2018 a family earning $40,000 a year will be paying $2,800 in higher taxes, even with McCain’s tax credit.
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