Palin: “Good Union Jobs” Mean Better Health Care

by   |  October 01, 2008

In what must have come as a shock to the McCain campaign yesterday, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has credited “good union jobs” for helping her family get the health care they otherwise would have been unable to afford. Jonathan Martin at Politico.com has the details:

"We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs," Palin explained to conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt. "Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick."

Maybe Palin should tell her running mate, because in addition to opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, making Americans pay out of pocket for health care is exactly what John McCain wants to do. According to the Economic Policy Institute report “Obama health plan outperforms McCain plain in coverage and efficiency,” McCain’s plan would tax employer health care benefits and shift the burden of finding health coverage to individuals. The report finds that roughly 20 million fewer people would have employer-sponsored insurance by 2018. Hotline On Call posted yesterday about a new AFL-CIO mailer (215k PDF) being sent to over 1 million voters in swing states. It spells out the risks to our health care under McCain’s plan:

• Taxing employer health care benefits would put 158 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage. [CAP, 4/29/08]
• Already weak protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions would be gutted, and insurance companies would be able to deny coverage and procedures even more easily than they do now. [CAP, 4/29/08]
• McCain also wants to privatize Medicare – just like the plan he proposed for Social Security. [Columbia Journalism Review, 4/18/08]

In other words, when it comes to health care under a McCain administration, you’re on your own. The McCain campaign will no doubt try to tell us Palin didn’t mean what she said about good union jobs and health care, but the truth is this is just one more example of John McCain being out of touch with the American people. Find more details in a recent report available for free download from the EPI Policy Center.