The New Hampshire Union-Leader, which has endorsed John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination, carried a column today by the Arizona senator on health care reform and using a conservative, free market approach to tackle this issue.
I agree that a free market approach would be a very good solution to reforming the health care system in this country. Medicare is a mess, people are cheating the system left and right (I know people who are doing this, and freely admit to doing so), and many on the left want to expand Medicare coverage...which will only lead to more corruption of the system itself.
However, is McCain really the man to do this?
He talks about using a conservative approach, but McCain (the so-called "maverick") hasn't always taken a conservative approach to any of the larger pieces of legislation he has created/supported. Look at his immigration reform bill that he co-sponsored with Ted Kennedy, a far cry from conservative (or even common sense) legislation.
Then again, he did vote against Bush's tax cuts in 2001 because he wanted a decrease in spending tied to the cuts. He also was one of the people who exposed the whole Abramoff affair, which qualifies him as someone who supports honest government. He also supports privatized social security accounts, free trade, and has vocally opposed universal health care reform...which, in itself, at least puts McCain on the conservative side of the fence on this issue.
Nonetheless, McCain can talk about supporting free market health care all that he wants, but Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, and Duncan Hunter have all supported this as well, and pushed similar proposals. While I believe that McCain is right to support such a concept as free market health care reform, he's not the only GOP candidate supporting this.
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