Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is proposing a greater federal commitment to people without health insurance on Tuesday, suggesting that it help funds states to set up non-profit risk pools to help Americans who are denied coverage or can’t afford it.
McCain’s health-policy experts provided a ballpark estimate of $7 billion a year for the new federal commitment.
“Cooperation among states in the purchase of insurance would … be a crucial step in ridding the market of both needless and costly regulations, and the dominance in the market of only a few insurance companies,” McCain says in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday morning in Tampa, Fla.
McCain is announcing his “Guaranteed Access Plan” on the second day of a “Call To Action” health-care tour that will later take him to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and Colorado.
Until now, McCain has emphasized such conventional conservative measures as tax deductions and malpractice reform. His new stance moves him closer to where former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was during the primary, an approach McCain had criticized.
McCain is taking a step beyond tax incentives and tort reform, but not a leap. He is noncommittal in his remarks, pointing to the non-profit organizations as one effective approach that he would discuss with governors.
Critics contend that under new tax incentives McCain has proposed, the richest and healthiest employees would opt out of their current coverage, leaving employers covering the sickest workers – those with preexisting conditions -- and likely lead companies to stop offering coverage. Individuals with pre-existing conditions who no longer have access to coverage through the workplace would have difficulty finding affordable coverage. These new federally-funded high-risk pools are an effort to address that concern by making coverage more available to some of those who might not be able to find coverage on their own.
On chronic diseases, McCain plans to support giving the Food and Drug Administration the explicit power to regulate nicotine – an authority that the FDA now assumes but that tobacco companies have challenged in court, and points to the cost benefits of helping people quit smoking .
