No, seriously. I'm not making that up [1]:

To pay for the tax credit, McCain would eliminate the tax exemption for people whose employers pay a portion of their coverage, raising an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues, Holtz-Eakin said. Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks. McCain would also cut costs by limiting health care lawsuits.

Clinton responds:

"The McCain plan eliminates the policies that hold the employer-based health insurance system together, so while people might have a 'choice' of getting such coverage, employers would have no incentive to provide it. This means 158 million Americans with job-based coverage today could be at risk of losing the insurance they have come to depend upon."

Uh, Hillary, divorcing health insurance from employment is the only sane part of McCain's plan. Obama says:

McCain is "recycling the same failed policies that didn't work when George Bush first proposed them and won't work now. Instead of taking on the big health insurance companies and requiring them to cover Americans with preexisting conditions, Senator McCain wants to make it easier for them to reject your coverage, drop it, or jack up the price you pay."

I didn't get that part, but maybe it's in the details McCain hasn't provided. And Obama is standing up to the insurance companies how? By not making you buy their product? According to this report [2], McCain said that he would "encourage state governments to create guaranteed-access plans" as a safety net for high-risk workers. Sounds like another unfunded mandate. And state Medicaid and SCHIP programs are already stretched to the breaking point. At any rate, one thing all the candidates agree on is that insurance policies should be portable and available across state lines. We will have to wait for more details of McCain's plan, but it doesn't sound like there's a dimes worth of difference between any of the three proposals. OK, maybe fifteen cents. And the bottom line is that the President can't unilaterally enact any of this anyway.