Thanks, but no thanks

Thank you to Bob Herbert for writing about McCain's Health Care Plan in the Times today. I'll admit I haven't been focused on health care, despite all the hard-hitting campaign coverage we've seen.

But I have, over the last couple of days, recalled Bush's old plan to privatize Social Security. Remember that? All this hullabaloo with with financial markets has prompted me to make the sign of the cross, praise Jesus, make offerings to Shiva, and generally THANK THE UNIVERSE for allowing Bush's plan to flop like a fish in polluted water. Can you imagine the disaster we would be in now if we had allowed investment banks to "manage" Social Security? Oh Lord.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your hats. There's a dumber horse in town.

McCain wants to privatize Health 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.)

That's right. On the leading issue of the campaign that affects "working families", McCain has learned nothing, nada, zilch from the current economic mess we're in.

Read more about it here (and slightly less about it here).
And weep.