I read a headline--when I went to look for the story story that followed that headline, what I found was rather confusing. McCain proposed to lower the overall Medicare premiums but to raise the premiums on Medicare Plan B, the RX drug plan.

He also proposes to raise the retirement age so that fewer people would be eligible to draw on both Social Security and Medicare.

He proposes raising income tax rates for people earning $260,000/yr. or more, but lowering the tax rates for corporations, while maintaining Pres. Bush's tax cuts.

Google it, please, and explain it all.

Why don't we just make this easy, Lizbeth. All you have to do is dig up that web page again, then you can post the link to it here and we can all look at the headline together.

I think that lizbeth's fingers got tangled up a bit, or a piece of a sentence got deleted where I put in the "(???)". What she probably intended to say is that 1) McCain voted for the budget reconciliation bill that reduced spending on Medicare by $6.4 billion by requiring that beneficiaries purchase medical equipment and cutting payments to home health care providers. [S. 1932, Vote #363, 12/21/05; Congressional Quarterly, 12/26/05], 2)McCain missed a critical vote to bargain for lower prescription drug prices for seniors and a vote to amend Medicare Part D so Medicare could negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs. [S. 3, Vote #132, 4/18/07; New York Times, 4/19/07; Families USA, 1/07], 3) McCain voted against protecting seniors from increases in their Medicare Part B premiums caused by increasing Medicare payments to physicians, while failing to enact savings from Medicare payments to private health plans. [S. 1932, Vote #287, 11/3/05], and 4) McCain voted to raise the Medicare Eligibility Age. In 1997, McCain voted to support provisions that would increase the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67 and impose a new $5 co-payment for home health care visits. [S. 947, Vote #112, 6/24/97; S. Amdt. 445, Vote #115, 6/25/97]

Personally, the only egregious change that I see in here is the elimination of medical equipment coverage. I don't think that the increase in Part B premiums has been out of line with increased costs, generally. Increasing the home health care co-pay may have the result of discouraging abuse. Raising the age of retirement eligibility has a mixed result: while it does reduce the total medicare payout it has the effect of keeping people in the workforce longer which has the one-for-one effect of increasing the number of (younger) unemployed persons.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices (as the VA has done very successfully) will probably come up again and again until it passes. I have to think, however, that every time another group negotiates lower prices, the price to the uninsured (unemployed, etc) just gets increased to compensate.

The other day's headline in USA Today read:

Medicare's night of the living dead masks larger horror

Scam artists are stealing from the system right under our noses. I doubt much will change our health care system, regardless whether McCain or Obama are in pole position. With one or two exceptions: Spiraling health care costs will continue to hit the average American hard. American Companies will continue to stay abroad employing foreign labor who enjoy Health Care compliments of their governments. This saves American companies between 14 to 18% a year per employee in providing American union required health and pension.