Meanwhile…

From a Times columnist who actually knows his asshole from a hole in the ground, which is more than I can say for some of his colleagues, here's some more McCainery that will terrify you:

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

…According to the study: "The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now."

The net effect of the plan, the study said, "almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care."

…The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We're seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)

Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It's the beginning of the end.

Brought to you by a person who has had his healthcare paid for by the United States government his entire life—first as the son of a Navy man, then as a Navy man himself, then as a veteran, then as a US Representative, then as a US Senator. And now, even if he loses the election and retires, he is qualified to be covered by Medicare because he turned 65 in 2001.

Must be nice.