Obama blasts McCain on health care

Posted: Saturday, October 04, 2008 4:27 PM by Mark Murray

From NBC/NJ's Athena Jones

The speech prompted a fierce back-and-forth between the campaigns, with each accusing the other of lying, culminating in the latest attempt by the McCain campaign to link Obama with '60s radical William Ayers.

While touting his own health-care plan to expand access to affordable coverage, Obama again tied McCain's proposals to the trauma in the markets, arguing the Arizona senator wanted to deregulate the insurance industry in the same way he helped deregulate the banking industry. Obama argued that would leave families without the basic protections they rely on.

"Here’s John McCain’s radical plan in a nutshell: He taxes health-care benefits for the first time in history; millions lose the health care they have; millions pay more for the health care they get; drug and insurance companies continue to make exorbitant profits profit; and middle-class families watch the system they rely on begin to unravel before their eyes," Obama told a crowd of some 18,000 people gathered at a waterfront park here. "Well, I don’t think that’s right. I'm pretty sure it ain't right."

The boisterous crowd shouted "that ain't right" at various times throughout the roughly 40-minute speech, which included no new policy proposals and was instead meant to highlight the differences between how each candidate's plan would affect voters.

Obama said that even with the economy in turmoil, the country could not afford not to fix the health-care system. He said his plan would reduce premiums, outlaw discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, save money by using electronic medical records, help small business to cover their employees and help companies cover the costs for catastrophic illnesses. It would be paid for in part by ending tax cuts for the wealthy.

At one point, the Democratic nominee borrowed one of Palin's favorite lines, saying under his plan the government would say "thanks, but no thanks" to drug companies for overpriced drugs 

Campaign advisers, in a morning conference call, repeatedly cast the Republican's plan as a radical restructuring of the health-care system that would hurt many ordinary Americans -- part of an ongoing effort to convince voters the Republican is out of touch with the needs of working families and more concerned with helping the rich and corporate interests.

During his speech, Obama bashed McCain for his ties to lobbyists, including those who fought health-care reform in the 1990s and for voting against expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program and supporting a cut in Medicare that would have raised premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for seniors.

A central part of Obama's arguement is that McCain's plan to pay for his health care tax credits -- $2,500 per person, $5,000 per family -- by taxing health care benefits "for the first time in history" would end up hurting people. He told the crowd that a person who makes $40,000 with employer-provided health insurance worth $10,000 would be taxed on an income of $50,000.

Obama's campaign planned a series of new radio and television ads, mailers and events in key swing states designed to drive the message that Obama's plan would do more to help ordinary people.

Battle of the press releases
The McCain campaign responded to the prepared remarks, which the Obama campaign sent out before his speech began, by accusing the senator of lying. “Barack Obama is lying to voters," Spokesman Tucker Bounds' email read in part. "It’s a bald faced lie because John McCain will improve the tax code so that middle-class paychecks aren’t used to pay government bureaucrats but instead will pay for the access to health care Americans deserve."

The Obama campaign then emailed its own response to what it called McCain's "health care lies."

“We understand why John McCain doesn’t want voters to know the full truth about his radical health-care plan, which would force at least 20 million Americans out of the health care they rely on, and let insurance companies, not doctors, make key decisions about families’ health," spokesman Bill Burton's statement read, going on to call any attempt to claim McCain's tax credit plan would not tax employee health benefits a "bald-faced lie."

The Obama campaign's response was followed shortly after by yet another dispatch from the McCain campaign, which seized on the Illinois senator's use of the word "radical."

“On a day when new reports have surfaced about Barack Obama's long association with a domestic terrorist, our Democratic opponent had the audacity to call John McCain's health care plan 'radical,'" Bounds wrote, referring to a New York Times article that explored the relationship between Obama and former Weather Underground member William Ayers. "The American people know radical when they hear it, and John McCain is not the candidate in this election they should be concerned about.”

Ayers was charged but not convicted with bombings his group planned to protest the Vietnam War. He worked with Obama on foundations in Chicago, but their relationship did not appear to be close, and the paper said there was little public evidence of their relationship since 2002. 

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