Nelson Award: Douglas Holtz-Eakin

McCain Campaign health care advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin is finding out first-hand how shitty the current health insurance system is.

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.

[...] 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.

Like "many Americans," Doug? Fuck you. Most of them aren't coming off six-figure campaign gigs, and sitting around while having enough major political and financial connections to get a job whenever you get off your ass and pick up the phone.

Oh, and those "tax-credits to pay for insurance" plan that you and your candidate were pushing last year? Not sure they'd do shit to help an unemployed economist...