Disregard the Figures...

Senator Barack Obama just came out with a new campaign advertisement in which he criticized Senator John Mccain’s health care proposal, which would require $882 billion worth of cuts in Medicare to be paid off. As Election Day draws near, both candidates are attempting to make their final impressions on voters, doing whatever it takes to point out the other’s flaws and constantly staying on the offensive in this race to the White House. Obama’s accusation is now being argued by the Mccain campaign as the “worst and most sustained distortion of policy in this entire campaign”. Although they may be necessary in paying off his plan, Mccain has not proposed any benefit cuts. The question behind Obama’s advertisement is that it was not an accurate criticism, since most it was made based on assumptions from news reports and rough calculations by a bipartisan group.
Obama isn’t the only one going off imprecise estimates. It seems that both candidates have been fuzzy in their numbers when it comes to health care. Although we have heard Senator Obama and Senator John Mccain give authoritative speeches and make confident promises that in their plans millions of Americans would be covered and a lot of money would be saved, it has now been confirmed by health economists that most of the figures the candidates cite are meaningless. It is impossible to know the future behavior of insurers, employers and consumers; the only thing they can do is guess. Each campaign has its paid consultants that will confirm figures even if they are not accurate , and so according to the New York Times, economists are saying it would be better for voters “to simply tune out all of the competing numbers and focus instead on the philosophical underpinnings of the candidates’ plans.” To the average American voter who isn’t engaged in politics and who probably has not concentrated much on the numerical figures spewed out in this election: just keep it simple and vote your party line (which you were going to do anyway).