The death toll in the financial sector is rising. Bear, Lehman, Fannie, Freddie and Merrill are all gone and AIG and Washington Mutual are in critical condition. Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its largest single day decline since September 11. There are myriad and complex reasons for the current crisis - and it would be simplistic to lay the blame with a single political party or politician. However, what the current collapse of the financial system certainly highlights is a fatal flaw that runs through much of John McCain's political philosophy - a fanatical belief that the market can solve every problem.

A stark example of this is McCain's healthcare policy. McCain health policy has three primary goals:

1) Dismantle the employer-sponsored insurance program, pushing people into a less regulated and more expensive individual insurance market
2) Reduce regulation and oversight of health insurers by allowing them to sell across state lines
3) Continue Bush's policy of privatizing Medicare through the provision of enormous subsidies to insurers

The effect of these policies would be brutal. According to a study released to today from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan. Allowing insurers to operate across state lines would have the effect of stripping states of their ability to protect their citizens as insurers seek domicile in the states that allow them to operate with the least oversight. The continued provision of subsidies to private insurers will accelerate the pending funding crisis in Medicare, ultimately resulting in tax increases or benefit reductions. Finally, McCain's view of the uninsured problem affecting over 40 million people is that the "market will figure it out."

The fate of Fannie, Freddie and Lehman provide harrowing examples of the fact that unfettered markets don't always work - this is particularly true for healthcare. While harnessing the efficiencies of free markets is a key element of Obama's plan, unlike McCain he is also acutely aware of the need to step in where markets fail. McCain would leave us all to the whims of largely unregulated markets. As the last few days show, that is just plain scary.