McCain: Make Health Care more like Banking

From Michael Tomasky (Guardian America)

According Tomasky, this should bury McCain. But it won't...

And with this, the election should be over

It won't be, because we have to talk about lipstick and pigs and probably Jeremiah Wright one more time, but it sure should be over after people learn about this one.

It comes via Paul Krugman, or actually a reader of Krugman's, who alerted him to these passages McCain had written in an obscure actuarial journal about 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.

Oops! Blast those early deadlines! Haven't we all written something for monthlies or quarterlies that was, as we say in our trade, "overtaken by events."

Overtaken by events, in the sense that he'd like to have those words back. But nevertheless expressive of what the McCain campaign actually believes. Make healthcare more like banking. If Obama and the DNC aren't all over this immediately, it's malpractice.

It's an interesting little snippet but it'll hardly put a dent in McCain's current following. Not because of lipstick. Or pigs. Or Wright. Or Islam. But because of this: why people vote Republican...