Plan for the Worst

Ezra's got this great ability to sum it all up and then break it all down in an extremely palatable fashion:

McCain has put forward a radical plan to reform the American health care system, and the mechanism by which he'll do that is a $3.6 trillion tax increase meant to make employer-based insurance unaffordable and necessitate that tens of millions seek an alternative option. Just as a carbon tax raises the price of carbon so people use less of it and a gas tax raises the price of fuel so people use less of it, McCain's tax raises the price of employer-based health care so employers offer less of it. And employees will feel the effect of that in full.

I'm reposting out of order, but here's another nugget:

The individual insurance market is not the same as the employer-based insurance market. It sacrifices the bargaining powers of numbers for the cost-effectiveness of comparison shopping. It is fractured. It has higher administrative costs. Insurers can discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions, geography, age, gender, and even simple whim. The risk pools are smaller. The deductibles are higher, as are the co-pays, and the spending caps are lower. And the individual insurance market is much more expensive...

Read the whole thing here.