There’s been a lot of talk about how Dems should take on McCain. Over at the Wonk Room, Elizabeth Edwards brilliantly demonstrates the way. She’s responding to a McCain staffer’s charge that she did not understand McCain’s so-called health care plan:
I freely admit that I am confused about the role of overnight funding in repurchase markets in the collapse of Bear Stearns. What I am not confused about is John McCain’s health care proposal. Apparently Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain, thinks I do “not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.” The problem, Douglas, is that, despite fuzzy language and feel-good lines in the Senator’s proposal, I do understand exactly how devastating it will be to people who have the health conditions with which the Senator and I are confronted (melanoma for him, breast cancer for me) but do not have the financial resources we have. In very unconfusing language: they are left outside the clinic doors.
She then proceeds to ask 4 straight questions. Here are the first two:
1. Under your plan, Senator McCain, would any health insurer be required to sell you or me (or those like us with pre-existing conditions) a health insurance policy?
2. You say your plan is going to increase competition to the point that it actually lowers costs. Isn’t there competition today among insurance companies? Haven’t costs continued to go up despite that competition?
Read the article and pass it along. Get everyone to call and mail the “news” shows asking them to let Elizabeth Edwards ask her questions next time they’re giving McCain air time. How do you expose the falsity of McCain’s “straight talker” image? Get the media to ask him intelligent questions like these. Elizabeth Edwards is setting the campaign standard that our remaining candidates, and the party as a whole, would do well to learn from and emulate.
