Socialized medicine is a term used primarily in the United States to refer to certain kinds of publicly-funded health care. Obama’s plan for solving healthcare problems is socialized medicine. Doctors and medical personnel work for the government. The hype surrounding socialzed medicine touts it as being great or as being awful. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. The important question one must ask is do you want to oversee your own healthcare or do you want the government to determine your treatment plan? John McCain believes that you should control your own health care needs with your doctor.

John McCain believes that the key to health care reform is to restore control to the patients themselves and provide care which is affordable and available to all. Healthcare should not be limited by where you work or how much your make. The McCain vision for healthcare involves making insurance innovative, portable, and affordable.

• Reform insurance through competition to make premiums less expensive and portable across state lines.

• Reform the tax code to provide $2,500 to individuals and $5000 to families to offset the cost of insurance. Families select their own provider based on family needs and the money is sent directly to the insurer. Any excess in funds would be deposited in to Health Savings Accounts.

• Make insurance more portable by providing insurance that follows individuals from job to job, into retirment or during periods of unemployment.

• Encourage and expand the benefits of Health Savings Accounts for families.

For those high risk patients and those that are uninsurable today, McCain plans to work with all 50 states to develop a Guaranteed Access Plan (GAP) to ensure that high risk patients with preexisting conditions have access to health coverage. His plan for GAP will be a best practice model such as establishing a nonprofit corporation that would contract with insurers to cover patients previously denied coverage. By joining with other states, costs would be lower due to an enlarged pool and lower overhead costs.

Some immediate solutions for lowering health care costs proposed by McCain include:

• Lowering the cost of drugs

• Dedicating more federal research to caring and curing chronic disease

• Reforming Medicaid and Medicare payment systems to cut costs

• Promoting the availability of smoking cessations programs

• Passing medical liability reform in all 50states

• Bringing transparency to health care costs