Let's Clear the Air!

by jwright~

My opinion piece was recently printed by the Cadillac (MI) News...

A good friend of mine, a staunch liberal, recently had a partial out-of-context remark published, credited to presidential candidate Senator John McCain regarding proposed health care deregulation that read, “… as we have done over the last decade in banking...” implying that this deregulation would give health care providers an unsupervised blank check. Not so.

Let’s clear the air. Factcheck.org, an impartial Internet fact finding group, stated that was a twisting of McCain’s words referring to presidential candidate Barack Obama’s recent ad using the same incomplete, out-of-context phrase.

Here’s the full text of Senator John McCain’s statement:

“I would also allow individuals to choose to purchase health insurance across state lines, when they can find more affordable and attractive products elsewhere that they prefer. 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. Consumer-friendly insurance policies will be more available and affordable when there is greater competition among insurers on a level playing field. You should be able to buy your insurance from any willing provider—the state bureaucracies are no better than national ones. Nationwide insurance markets that ensure broad and vigorous competition will wring out excess costs, overhead, and bloated executive compensation.”

As Factcheck.org also stated, “Note that McCain began by speaking of buying insurance ‘across state lines.’ His comparison with banking regulation was limited to ‘opening up the insurance market’ to ‘nationwide’ competition to ‘provide more choices’ to consumers.”

Presidential candidate Barack Obama has claimed that words have meanings. I contend if we are to use other people’s words, let’s use their entire statement in order to clarify their original intent, not to confuse and scare the voters..

CadillaqJaq
10/3/2008