McCain campaign tries to "straight talk" their health care policy

The McCain/Palin campaign's Senior Policy Adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin, eagerly dismissed "misconceptions made by the Obama campaign about McCain's health care policy" in a teleconference today. The McCain campaign denied that McCain would tax health care benefits for the first time. Holtz-Eakin said "McCain's tax code will equally subsidize private health insurance." The Obama campaign supposedly accused McCains health care policy because Americans with pre-existing
medical conditions would not receive coverage. Holtz-Eakin said "McCain'ss guaranteed access plan for every state would implement fines on companies that deny care inappropriately."

The McCain campaign said the Obama campaign created a false perception of a $882 billion cut to
medicare, phrasing it as a 'cut to necessary care, but Holtz-Eakin said that "there will be no cuts to health care, especially Medicare." He also noted that the same health care benefits will grow more slowly.

Holtz-Eakin ended the conference by saying that Obama's plan is an expansion of big government and is on the path towards "risky sub-prime health care".

McCain-Palin campaign attacks Obama's tax proposals

"The reality is not that Barack Obama has a tax-cut, or even a plan to make jobs. The reality is that he has a plan that is riddled with bad incentives, full of targeted handouts, and fundamentally based on redistribution of wealth, and stands in sharp contrast to John McCain's approach." This was stated by Doug Holtz-Eakin, Senior Policy Adviser for the McCain-Palin campaign, in response to Senator Barack Obama's (D-IIll.) tax reform plan. Nancy Pfotenhauer, Senior Policy Adviser for the McCain-Palin campaign, said Obama's tax plan "punishes achievement".

The campaign advisers claim Obama's tax reforms amount to "sending checks to individuals, many of whom may not be working, and who certainly do not have a tax liability". They added that Obama's tax cuts for job creation in American businesses are "too little too late", and too small to offset the supposed damages his own policies would do. Pfotenhauer said, "if this is his prescription for our economy, at a time when we're already ailing, I cannot think of any kind of medicine that could be worse".

"Barack Obama's overall economic policy can be characterized as the Europeanization of the american economy, because it is effectively a high tax, high spending protectionist approach," Pfotenhauer said, "and it doesn't work. All you need to do is look at the economies in say Germany or France, where you have, even in our tough economic time, unemployment rates that are significantly higher, growth rates that are significantly lower, and a quality of life or living that is about a third lower than in the United States." Holtz-Eakin and Pfotenhauer were participating in a conference call on Obama's tax plan, which according to the McCain advisers, includes approximately a trillion dollars of new spending and increased tax credits for Americans that do not pay income taxes.