You can’t make up stuff like this. In the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies (the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries — the people who figure out how much life and health insurance should cost) there is an article from John McCain. Here’s what McCain says about market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Opening up the banking market by removing those nasty regulations is exactly what led to the current financial meltdown on Wall Street, as barriers between mortgage banks and investment banks were torn down for the first time since just after the great depression. Sub-prime mortgages were one of those “innovative products” that resulted.

The cost of bailing out the failing financial institutions is estimated (by the Bush administration) to be more money than it would cost to pay for health insurance for every citizen of the US. So if McCain has his way, we just might be bailing out failing health insurance companies in a few years. That is, if our country has any money left by then.

UPDATE: Apparently Obama has picked up on this quote. At a rally in Jacksonville, Obama said that McCain “wants to do for healthcare what Washington did for banking”. As a side note, the rally attracted an overflow crowd of 28,000 people, 8,000 of whom were turned away at the gate and had to listen from outside. McCain spoke at the same spot on Monday, and 3,000 people showed up (less than were turned away for Obama).