"It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money," said The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We're seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

"Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It's the beginning of the end.

"When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans” either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.

"That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.

"In a refrain we've heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these "needless and costly" insurance regulations.

"This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans' ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone."

The J. Sid "McBush" McSame mantra, getting rid of "needless and costly insurance regulations."  He plans to create another debacle with employer based health care just like the financial crisis that's happening right now. 

McCain isn't fit to be president.  Wake up, people.