McCain STILL Wants to Privatize Social Security - and Health Care Too

Even the collapse of our financial markets wasn't enough to make John McCain face the reality that excessive privatization is a prescription for disaster. McCain still wants to privatize Social Security:

The Republican presidential nominee says all options must be considered to stave off insolvency for the government insurance and retirement program, and top McCain advisers say that includes so-called personal retirement accounts like those President Bush pushed in 2005 but abandoned in the face of congressional opposition.

The aides tried to soothe voters concerned about the bankruptcies, takeovers and bailouts on Wall Street by declaring McCain favored only the option of such accounts, just for younger workers, and most likely in a conservative investment vehicle such as bonds.

Notice the bulls**t (or bamboozlement, as Josh Marshall politely calls it). The Bush-McCain plan for privatizing Social Security was always about giving the "option" to "younger workers," so McCain's current position is no less radical than the original plan.

And the problem, of course, is that Social Security pays out money to retirees with money paid in by workers. So if you let workers stop paying into Social Security, you have less money for retirees. And obviously if you let younger workers out, that shortfall is multiplied by the larger number of years left in that worker's working years.

While Bush's plan was never actually proposed in writing, economists estimated the opt-outs would cost $1 trillion, which taxpayers would have to make up. (Why is it that everything Republicans screw up costs taxpayers $1 trillion per screwup?) So McCain's plan would still force taxpayers to cover that $1 trillion in benefits already earned by current and future retirees.

The supposed benefit of letting younger workers opt-out was that they could do better financially turning their "Social Security" money over to Wall Street brokers. But now we know those brokers loaded up their portfolios with real estate bubbles which have now burst, bringing down Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. How would you be sleeping at night if your "Social Security" was in their hands?

But destroying Social Security one isn't enough for McCain. Here's what he wrote this month for Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries.

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.

dday nails it:

As if the health care system weren't already immoral enough, McCain wants insurance companies to come up with the same kinds of attractive "innovative instruments" that the banking industry was free to do, unencumbered by any oversight. Maybe they can create "MRI default swaps" or "collateral knee surgery obligations" or some other fun packaged security that could be sold to China. After all, why shouldn't they have a say over whether or not you get your medication?

The bottom line is clear: Anyone who votes for John McCain is fiscally and financially insane.