Fix Health Care Policy

Thursday, Democrats and Republicans will convene at the President’s request to discuss the way forward on achieving bipartisan health care reform. In a recent paper, Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko discusses how congressional Democrats and the President can use this meeting to start over on health care reform by enlisting Republicans to pass legislation both sides agree on.

Says Owcharenko, “If the President is sincere and the summit is going to be successful, it must begin by setting aside the highly unpopular bills that the House and Senate have developed. Simply adjusting the magnitude of these proposals or adding new “conservative” provisions as suggested in the President’s latest proposal, does not change their fundamental direction.”

Polls show a majority of Americans stand in opposition to the left’s health care proposals, which fall short of meeting expectations established by promises made by the President. To restore the nation’s trust in Washington, Congress and the President should focus on areas of reform which have bipartisan support. Owcharenko suggests the following as areas in which to move forward: (more…)

Tags: entitlements, Health Care Summit, insurance, insurance reforms, ObamaCare, President's proposal, state-based reform, tax treatment

The President’s health care proposal contains little that is new. The well tested rhetoric used by the White House to sugarcoat the health policy outline should not fool ordinary Americans. This proposal is even more expensive than the Senate bill upon which it is apparently based: $950 billion over ten years rather than $871 billion.

Consider the claims made by the White House regarding the effects of the President’s proposal on the health care system.

The Rhetoric on Affordability.
“It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today.”

The Reality: In fact, the tax credit would be limited to only a limited number of persons within a limited set of income brackets, not the entire middle class. One cannot ignore the tax increases, or the prescribed cost of the health care benefits packages themselves. As the premiums increase, the cost of the subsidies, based on percentage of income, would track these increases, resulting in another direct cost shift onto all taxpayers. In fact, the President’s proposal, based on the Senate bill, would result in major tax increases (estimated at $629 billion over ten years) and would include a variety of middle class tax increases. This, of course, once again violates the president’s promise to refrain from imposing taxes on those with family incomes of less than $250,000 per year. (more…)

Tags: budget, Health Care Summit, health exchange, health insurance premiums, pre-existing conditions, President's proposal, tax increases

The President’s new version of Obamacare, and his method of passing it, are not popular with the American people. Dubbed the Health Care Nuclear Option, this tactic will only further anger the American by sidetracking the filibuster in the Senate and creating an even more highly charged partisan atmosphere in Congress. The content of Obamacare, and the strategies being employed to pass it, violates one of our nation’s core first principles: the consent of the governed. Our Republic is not a democracy where bare 51 vote majorities rule. Throughout our nation’s history most major legislative changes in Washington have historically been bipartisan and President Obama’s effort clearly falls short of that tradition.

As we reported late last week: (more…)

Tags: Blair House, Health Care Summit, nuclear option, ObamaCare, reconciliation, Republic

Yesterday, the Daily Caller posted a story on its website about the confusion on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle about the future of Obamacare. It featured a quote from Congressman Heath Shuler (D-NC) on the White House’s healthcare strategy:

“I was actually surprised that they’re pushing it again. The most important thing is jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. We need to focus on jobs,” said Rep. Heath Shuler, North Carolina Democrat and a leader of the 54-member Blue Dog coalition of conservative Democrats.”

Rep. Shuler is right. Finding sensible solutions which would bolster the economy and create jobs should have been a major focus of an Administration which has spent the better part of this year advocating for a massive deficit-busting stimulus bill and a disastrous healthcare reform overhaul. (more…)

Tags: jobs, ObamaCare, Rep. Heath Shuler

The White House recently released President Obama’s health care reform proposal. The plan incorporates a mixture of the many tax increases passed by the House and Senate, hiking taxes by almost $750 billion over ten years. This is on top of $1.3 trillion in other tax increases the President recently proposed in his 2011 budget. Not that there is ever a good time to raise taxes, but doing so as the economy is still emerging from a deep recession is particularly ill-advised and will likely prolong full recovery. Moreover, the President’s proposal deviates from his stated goal to address the soaring spending and debt problem the nation faces by piling on massive new spending and taxes.

Payroll tax hikes: Obama accepted the Senate’s plan to break long-held policy by raising the Hospital Insurance (HI) portion of the payroll tax on high-income earners to pay for a new and unrelated health care entitlement. He then doubled-down on this dangerous new precedent by separately applying the HI tax to investment income for the first time. The tax code already taxes investment too much. Higher taxes still on dividends, interest and business income increases the cost of capital which will further depress investment and thus job creation. Ironic to propose this at the very time the President wants employers to create jobs.

(more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, Medicare, ObamaCare, payroll tax hikes, President's proposal, tax increases

This Thursday leaders from Congress will join the President for a meet for a “summit” on healthcare reform. This meeting comes amid reports that despite White House claims that the meeting is to bring both sides together to hash out a bipartisan bill, movement is already afoot to use the reconciliation process to pass the version of Obamacare the public already knows and dislikes. This has provoked concern among Americans hoping for a bipartisan solution, that this summit is nothing more than a sham. (more…)

Tags: Health Care Summit, ObamaCare, President's proposal, reconciliation

The health care plan President Obama recently released is mostly a combination of the different plans passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. But in one major way it breaks with long-standing precedent, proposing a fundamental wrong-headed change to both entitlement policy and tax policy. He proposes for the first time to tax capital income to support entitlement programs.

Payroll taxes have always applied just to wages and salaries and the revenue those taxes raise has gone solely to pay for entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. The deal has always been that we pay payroll taxes during our working years and receive the benefits they fund after we retire. President Obama’s health care plan would shatter this compact forever.

The Hospital Insurance (HI) portion of the payroll tax is 2.9 percent on all wages and salary that is paid half (1.45 percent) by workers and half (the remaining 1.45 percent) by employers. It is supposed to pay only for the hospital insurance portion of Medicare benefits that retirees receive. President Obama’s plan adopts this break with long-held policy and doubles down by further severing the link between HI and Medicare benefits. Obama’s plan not only increases the HI tax on wages and salaries for high-income earners similar to the Senate bill, it also applies the HI tax to investment income for the first time. Obama’s unprecedented plan would levy the current 2.9 percent HI tax on what the administration obnoxiously refers to as “unearned” income, which includes capital gains, interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents for families earning more than $250,000 a year ($200,000 for single filers). (more…)

Tags: entitlements, Hospital Insurance, Medicare, Medicare payroll tax, President's proposal, Social Security

Flacking for President Barack Obama’s “new” health care plan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters assembled for yesterday’s press briefing: “The president posted ideas of his on the White House website today. We hope Republicans will post their ideas either on their website, or we’d be happy to post them on ours, so that the American people could come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday.” And this might have been a small bit of successful Obama administration gamesmanship on health care and transparency in government except for one small problem: reality. Not only do House Republicans already have their own health care plan, not only is it already available online, but the White House’s own website already links to it!

And speaking of the President’s behind-closed-doors plan, don’t believe any of those headlines showing a $950 billion price tag. That is an Obama administration-created number that should not be afforded any more credibility than Gibbs’ grasp of the contents of his own website. In fact, the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published this about the President’s new plan yesterday:

“Preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.”

In other words, even with over a year to prepare for the moment they would finally release their own plan, the White House could only manage to obtain an “incomplete” grade from the official budget scorekeeper in Washington. So every time you hear the President say “my plan is paid for” or “my plan reduces the deficit,” just remember you are going to have to take his word for it.

And where the President’s plan is more firm than fuzzy, it only makes the scheme worse: (more…)

Tags: CBO, Cornhusker Kickback, Medicaid, Medicare, ObamaCare, President's proposal, price controls