McCain's plan was to get rid of the tax exemption for health care benefits, and replace them with individual vouchers which would grow at the rate of inflation.
The idea was that once consumers had some SKIN IN THE GAME (a great drinking game candidate during the three debates), they would realize how much money they were spending on healthcare and stop having so many damn illnesses.
Decoupling health insurance from employers isn't actually a bad idea, but if you did that with no new mechanism for risk pooling and no new regulations on insurance companies, they would cherry-pick young and healthy customers. The individual insurance market for the middle-aged and sick is brutal, and those people would be on their own.
The real problem here is that every Republican legislator is primarily interested in stopping Obama's agenda, regardless of its content. The lesson they learned from Clinton's first two years is that a minority party in the US can stop anything it wants to as long as it stays united, and that the public will blame the governing party for gridlock.
Their main excuses are shamelessly obvious lies. They wring their hands about the deficit after voting for unfunded wars, tax cuts, and drug benefits under Bush. They turn around and promise to never allow any cuts to Medicare, which is the biggest long-term liability on America's books. This after telling us we have to be weddy, weddy concerned about Social Security.
Sometimes it boggles my mind that a system like this can exist, or that so many people could rise to such powerful positions with almost no concern for the well being of the country they serve.
