Whining Americans Choose Caviar Health Care

Al Hubbard, architect of the Bush-cum-McCain health plan, compares Americans' use of the health care system to shoppers who indiscriminately buy caviar while someone else foots the bill, just as Senator Phil Gramm exits as co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign after calling America a "nation of whiners" in a "mental recession."

Hubbard, former assistant to the president for economic policy, spoke at a Thursday event at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He blamed patients for driving up health care costs because insurance insulated them from the real costs of treatment.

He suggested that American consumers would run similarly amok in a world where employers provided "food insurance" instead of health insurance. "Pretty soon you would start buying caviar, the most expensive steak, and you would start buying more than you needed," he said.

Hubbard crafted the health care plan unsuccessfully promoted by President Bush and subsequently embraced by GOP presumptive nominee Senator John McCain. It would eliminate incentives for employers to offer insurance, shifting the burden of health care costs onto individuals, who would be granted a tax break to buy insurance. Critics say the tax credits would be at an amount far below what would be required to purchase health insurance.

About eighty percent of health care costs are incurred by the sickest twenty percent of Americans, those whose doctors order expensive treatments for difficult diseases such as cancer. Hubbard is suggesting that Americans going through serious health challenges should be shoppers first and patients second.

This remarks comes at a poor time for Senator McCain, who was forced to jettison co-chairman Phil Gramm because his remarks made the GOP presumptive nominee seem insensitive to the Americans' economic difficulties. Do Hubbard's comments mean McCain is hoping to lower health care costs by forcing Americans to treat health care as a luxury as precious as caviar?

Comments

[blackmouth]

Yeah, bail out failed corporations, give tax dollars to companies that don't compete for contracts, send millions of tax dollars on a pallet to Iraq and loose the money, spend billions on a failed war, and deregulate everything and destroy the middle class. We have a right to say how our tax money should be spent and taking care of everyone's health care needs sounds pretty good to me. We have a right to health care, affordable education and a good wage to live on...period.

[LorettaSingbiel]

AMEN TO THAT!!!

[JAB20]

Don't you kid yourself. Within two years after those health insurance tax breaks they want to give you, health insurance would cost that much more with no more benefits or perhaps fewer. And more people would be without health care because health care had become more expensive.

The Bush-McCain health care plan puts more money and control in the pockets of the huge health insurers and the massive pharmaceutical companies which is, at the plan's heart, the purpose of it.

[BushSunkOurShip]

Al Hubbard, architect of the Bush-cum-McCain health plan, compares (should say Cheney;s) use of the health care system to shoppers who indiscriminately buy caviar while someone else foots the bill

Can you immagine just what the total health price to tax payers for Cheney , which even has a private doctor which follows him were ever he goes.

Like a nurse stated ,,,, Cheney would be dead if he had the American citizens health coverage...

[Dick214]

Hubbard, and all the others who ride about in limousines, have a completely insulated view of how the other 99% live. In order to salve their consciences they look upon us as whining, indolent shirkers who could be as well off as they are if we weren't so damnably unambitious. I thoroughly concur with Napoleon's remark that religion is all the keeps the rich alive. Being an antitheist myself, I would be quite delighted if their were many more like me, in which case there would many less of Hubbard's ilk.

[CaptainVideo]

The "everybody should be on his own" philosophy of the economic conservatives is completely inconsistent with both the teachings of Jesus and also with a considerable part of the old testament. For example, according to the old testament, God destroyed Sodom because they failed to care for the poor and needy.

Many of the economic conservatives have the same kind of belief in and reverence for the workings of an unfettered market place that religious belivers have for their religious doctrines. For them laizzes faire is a secular religion.

What is Hubbard's religious belief? I can be confident he is not a religious fundamentalist. I would not be surprised if he is an agnostic or atheist.

[SpoxLogic]

Is this what it means when someone claims to be a GOP conservative?

[who38]

More or less.

[rrcn]

You can tell what John McCain thinks about the American people by listening to the people who surround him. Its an old adage, but completely true "Birds of a feather flock together". Don't expect anything new from this old fossil.

[NotMcCain]

"Like buying caviar on someone else's bill"?

That describes Congress's health care, not mine, with its huge monthly premium + $4000/yr. deductible + co-pay--all for genuinely cr*ppy coverage!

Is he insane?

[CaptainVideo]

Hubbard is an economic elitist who undoubtedly has caviar type healt insurance and is simply unaware of the situation faced not only by those who have no health isurance, but also those whose health insurance denies claims on technicalities and/or refuses to cover crucial medical proceedures.

While McCain, having become a double talker, will not admit this, these people represent his economic philosophy.

[LorettaSingbiel]

And NO DOUBT you're covered ... UNTIL you file a claim!

[darker]

Al Hubbard, architect of the Bush-cum-McCain health plan is part of the REPUBLICAN'S NANNY STATE FOR THE RICH and corporate welfare queens who TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN!

What's Hubbard know about average working and middle class Americans?
As much as Bush-McCain: NOTHING. ZILCH!

Hubbard IS A DUNCE.
It's a BIG NEGATIVE for McCain to associate himself constantly with
millionaires and billionair CORPORATE PROFITEERS & LOBBYISTS who are CRASHING AMERICA'S ECONOMY and the lives of middle income folks.

[wndrwrthg]

First their whining, now their getting sick. Damn peasants. If they wanted health care they should be in congress.

[poorwriter]

Ooohh, snap!

[ed3541]

Politicians don't care about affordable health care for Americans. They take money from the pharmacutical industry and the health insurance lobbyists and always take the corporate side in this debate. The pharmacutical and insurance lobby wrote the prescription drug bill and bribed congress to pass it. That's why congress gave up the right to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs in this country. We need Universal Health Care like most other enlightened countrys have. This is the only Western nation where you can go bankrupt because of health costs.

Blessed are the PEACEMAKERS
Damned are the WARMONGERS

[SimonNZ]

People pay taxes to governments on the expectation of receiving benefits in return. In most western countries one of the most important of these benefits is government funded health care.

In the US however, the public pays for its own health care with private insurance (if they can afford it.) This allows the US government to tip those trillions of tax dollars which could be used to provide health care into black holes like Iraq.

For miscreants like Al Hubbard to claim citizens choose health care options like caviar is an outrage.

[justobserve]

Exactly!

[4President]

None of this matters. America is comfortable with a white man who will tell them he wants to hurt them and apprehensive towards a candidate who offers them a prescription for their pain, but is black.