Top McCain campaign adviser running out of insurance, has pre-existing condition

[FourScore]

Former McCain strategist is about to lose his health insurance

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 2, 2009

If history had taken a different course, Doug Holtz-Eakin would be inside the McCain White House driving the Republican president's domestic agenda, including health-care reform. But now, one year after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost the presidential election, the man who was by McCain's side as the campaign's top health-care guru remains unemployed -- and his COBRA health coverage is running out.

Irony of ironies, it gets worse. Holtz-Eakin, who is about to start shopping for insurance on the individual market, is 51. And he has one of those pesky "preexisting conditions" that insurance companies often cite in denying coverage.

"A right renal autotransplant," he said, pointing to his abdomen as he described the 1990 transplant surgery he went through after one of his kidneys was damaged in an accident. "They got rid of the artery, moved my kidney and rebuilt me for the 21st century. If you look at my file, any insurance company would go, 'Hmm . . .' "

Good luck.

Holtz-Eakin unraveled his woes in an interview one recent afternoon from the seventh floor of an office building on Constitution Avenue NW. Across the street was the U.S. Capitol and the stately committee rooms where Holtz-Eakin frequently testified as director of the Congressional Budget Office (2003-05). Sixteen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue was the West Wing, where he briefed President George W. Bush and his aides as chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (2001-02).

But on this day, Holtz-Eakin was in a windowless office that he is temporarily occupying so he has someplace other than Starbucks to work on his laptop. On the walls of his sublet space were someone else's Ohio State University seal and someone else's beach scene prints.

"This is some guy's office. I don't know who he is," Holtz-Eakin said, turning in his swivel chair to the bookshelf. "These are his books."

At the end of the 2008 presidential campaign, when Holtz-Eakin flew home from Arizona for the final time, his job was finished. His BlackBerry stopped buzzing. Reporters stopped calling. He stared out the window of his 23rd-floor apartment in Arlington and realized, suddenly, that he had all the free time in the world.

Since then, he's kept busy offering advice, paid and pro-bono, to politicians, and writing articles, giving speeches and making appearances on cable television about health care and economic policy.

"My mother's deeply concerned that I don't have a job," joked Holtz-Eakin, a divorced father of two grown children.

Holtz-Eakin said he's been paying about $1,000 a month to extend the private health insurance he received on McCain's campaign through the government's COBRA program, but that will expire in a few months. This is the first time in his life he has not had employer-provided health coverage. "I worry about where I go next in the way many Americans do," he said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110102121.html

[Systematic Chaos]

1. I feel genuinely sorry for this guy, but on the other hand karma sure is a bitch.

:shrug:

[SPedigrees]

2. Oh cry me a river for Holtz-Eakin. nt

[Juche]

3. He's still rich, so he hasn't learned anything

I think he knows he can buy a high deductible plan for $1700/month or so, and it appears he can afford that. The impression I get is he has a lot in savings.

Let him get by on unemployment insurance and see what he thinks about health reform though.

[Cirque du So-What]

4. Why in gawd's name doesn't a Democrat

pick up this fumbled ball and RUN with it? This info is in the public domain now, so it should be fair game. Besides, Holtz-Eakin may not care if he becomes a poster child for healthcare reform...unless he's such an ideological prick that he'd rather pay through the nose (or die) for repug principles, that is.

[HereSince1628]

5. What? As a very valuable member of the leigh bureaus speaker stable

I'm sure this is mostly about the misery of coughing up bucks that should be personal profit, and not about not having the money to do so.

http://www.leighbureau.com/speaker.asp?id=344

[ArbustoBuster]

6. This prick doesn't have a job because he's lazy.

With his resume he could get a job making in the high five or low six figures in a heartbeat. But he might have to actually work.

He wants a job at some cushy right-wing think tank taking meetings with foreign dictators and writing an article a month, not a job where he has to attend investor meetings, run a corporate department, or teach college students.

Cry me a river. I couldn't afford a thousand dollars a month as an extra expense on top of my current budget no matter what I did. He can, easily.