If the GOP wins the election in a week, here is what we could be looking at, assuming that the Congress is as spineless as it has been in the last year.
Under a McCain presidency, even with a Democratic Congress, there would be increased privatization of Medicare. They don’t call it that, of course. They give it a Madison Avenue label: “Medicare modernization”, i.e., turning larger and larger sections of Medicare over to the insurance carriers, with the taxpayer footing the subsidy bill.

This is done in the worn out name of better service and saving money, even though, rather than saving money, it will cost more, and service will deteriorate even more. This is always the case with privatization schemes. When the IMF and World Bank (yes, the healthcare crisis is an international one) force countries to whom they lend money to privatize their public services, they throw those countries into crisis. Privatization is their ugly quid pro quo. The bankers know very well that this costs taxpayers more and that services suffer, but their ideology (neoliberalism) must be served and the coffers of the corporations and banks must be filled. Therefore, both the current international financial crisis and the ongoing Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security can be laid, in part, at the door of the IMF and the World Bank and their neoliberal ideologues.