Health plans and the campaign

Powerline looks at dishonest advertising on health plans:

Yuval Levin, in the Weekly Standard, has exposed the multiple liberties Obama-Biden have taken with the truth on this subject:

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Unfortunately, Obama's dishonest attacks on McCain's plan are perfect for use by an unscrupulous politician in a negative ad. For although McCain's health care plan isn't terribly complex, it can't be explained effectively in 30 seconds. For that reason and because, in any event, McCain lacks the resources to air the truth about his plan with anything like the frequency that Obama is able to tell falsehoods about it, the Obama attack has gone unanswered.

And looks at the underlying conflict over health plans in general:

There is a basic conflict of interest between young, healthy people and older people with more medical needs. Liberals often describe the uninsured as lacking "health care," but of course this isn't true. Uninsured people get health care all the time. Moreover, a great many young people, knowing that they are in little danger of being seriously ill and knowing, moreover, that if they do get sick or have an accident they will be cared for whether they have insurance or not, make a rational decision not to pay for health insurance. They prefer to take their incomes in cash.

One of the main (albeit unspoken) objectives of liberal health care plans, including but not limited to socialized medicine, is to force young people to pay into the system to support the medical needs of their elders. So the conflict that Bob describes is not unique to McCain's approach. However, it does need to be considered whenever government intervention in the health care industry is contemplated.