FixHealthCarePolicy

Is Congress Exempting Itself From Health Insurance Tax?

It is still far from clear what the White House’s new strategy to pass health care reform will be in the face of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate. But according to Federal News Radio negotiations between the House and Senate are still ongoing, including this victory for House Democrats:

Federal employees covered under some of the more expensive plans in the Federal Employees Heath Benefit Program now have some breathing room as well.

Federal workers had been left out of an earlier compromise on health care reform shielding union workers from a proposed 40-percent excise tax until 2018.

The office of Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) says he “personally called the White House to express his concern of leaving federal employees out of the deal.” An agreement reached Wednesday extends the exemption to federal employees through 2018 as well.

(more…)

Tags: Cadillac Plans, congress, ObamaCare, taxes

Family Health Care: A Giant Game of Chance

The House and Senate health care legislation resembles a game show more than deliberate exercise in public policy. As confusing and confused legislation language is translated into dollars and cents, how much Americans will find themselves paying for health care? It looks more and more like a giant game of chance.

Not only is Congress leaving the current inequities created by the federal tax treatment of health insurance in place, it is busy creating new ones.

Family Premiums. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that under the House bill, the average premium in 2016 will be $15,000 and the average cost sharing will be $5,500 for a family policy or a total of $20,500. Under the Senate bill, the average premium will be $14,100 and the average cost sharing will be $5,000 for a family policy or a total of $19,100. Is the higher cost House plan better? How do we know? If the Senate can come in $1,400 lower than the House, could the price tag be lowered by another $1,400? If not, why not?

Under the House bill, a family of four with income of $30,000 will receive the $20,500 value for just $1,100, or less than $100 per month. The family will receive premium and cost sharing subsidies from their neighbors worth $19,400. Under the Senate bill, a family of four with income of $30,000 will receive premium and cost sharing subsidies worth $16,800, still quite generous. These subsidies are so generous in fact, that the House and Senate leaders don’t want millions of Americans to have them to buy private health insurance. (more…)

Tags: congress, Congressional Budget Office, family health care, family premiums, Medicaid, meidcare

U.S. House Votes in Favor of Obamacare

The health care bill passed by the House tonight took another step towards transferring power over personal health care decisions from individuals to bureaucrats in Washington. The Republican alternative was a good strong first step of targeted reforms that are necessary to improve health care financing and delivery.

If it were to become law, the House bill would put the government in control of over half of all health care spending and would dramatically shift America’s health care system from one that is largely private to one that is subordinated to government control.

The bill engineers a massive expansion of the Medicaid, a welfare program that provides substandard care to lower-income and poor Americans and threatens state budgets. The addition of the public plan, a new federal health care entitlement, would add to the crushing tax burden Americans already face from exiting entitlements. Even worse, millions of Americans would be pushed out of their existing health care coverage, notwithstanding the promises of the President. (more…)

Tags: alternative, congress, democrat, health care reform, hoyer, Medicaid, Medicare, Obama Health Care Plan, pelosi, republican, vote

Behind Closed Doors: The Obamacare Arm Twisting Begins

The heat is happening behind closed doors as the U.S. House prepares for a Saturday showdown vote on health care. Access is everything. By keeping Members of Congress in Washington, D.C., this weekend, Democratic leaders keep them away from angry constituents back in their home states, where the Members normally would depart from Friday to Monday. (Note: The tactics aren’t different from what Republicans sometimes used when they held the majority.)

The first step is to keep Congress in town. The second is to keep them monitored and available for whenever leaders want to summons them for backroom meetings—sometimes to discuss and sometimes to pressure and browbeat and offer deals. A “buddy system” is sometimes assigned so a fellow Congressman from the party’s whip team keeps tab on each undecided member’s whereabouts, their cell and other private phone numbers, the places they tend to hangout between votes, and similar information.

Members don’t like to be found and pressured. As one speaker noted at Thursday’s “House Call” tea party event at the U.S. Capitol: “There may be some members hiding right now. They may be in the basement. They may be in the cafeteria, pretending they’re not a Congressman.” (more…)

Tags: arm-twisting, congress, health care reform, hoyer, Members of Congress, Obama Health Care Plan, ObamaCare, pelosi

Congress Gets Special Health Perks with Low-Cost Clinic

ABC News details this week how congressional members — who are in the midst of considering legislation that would dramatically alter one-sixth of the U.S. economy — have access to an elaborate Navy medical clinic at the U.S. Capitol, which is “described by those who have seen it as something akin to a modern community hospital.”

The facility is on-call and ready to provide Congress with some of the country’s best and most efficient government-run health care, ABC News reported. While the clinic, and at least six satellite office it support, admitted to providing physicals and flu shots, ABC News found in interviews with former physician staff that the facility provides “a wealth of primary care medical services to senators, representatives and Supreme Court justices.” This included regular visits by a consulting chiropractor to on-site physical therapy, with members often not charged for seeing specialists.

As Eduard Balbona, a Jacksonville, Fla., internist who worked as a staff physician in the facility in the 1990’s, told ABC News: “A member walked in and was generally walked right back into a physician’s office. They get good care. They are not rushed. They are examined thoroughly.”

Tags: access to care, congress, health reform

The President Learned Nothing From August

“There remain some significant details to iron out.” Thus spoke the President of the United States last night, in an address in which, with a straight face, he told an awaiting nation that he was finally delivering not lofty rhetoric, but his grand plan on health care.

On that score President Obama was right. It may have been, however, a bit of an understatement. Absent, of course, was how exactly all the savings he confidently predicted would materialize, how exactly the government would prevent employers from dumping all their employees into a government plan and how czars and boards would operate without bureaucrats coming between Americans and their doctors. Ah, details, details.

In fact, while he kept referring to “our plan” he never explained whose plan he meant. One of the two House plans? The one Senate plan that exists or the Finance one that’s under construction? What’s he actually for? What’s the President against? (more…)

Tags: congress, President Obama, townhall meetings

Does Congress Have a Transparency Problem?

That’s what a recent Washington Examiner blog asks, pointing out that House health care bill, which passed in committee last week and will receive a House floor vote after the August recess, has been delayed in being posted. The blog notes a similar problem with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has still not released the final text of the health reform legislation it passed on July 15.

Tags: congress, health care legislation, transparency

Families and Small Businesses to be Taxed to Pay for Health Reform

To help pay for its expensive and painfully complex health care bill, Congress plans on burdening families and small businesses earning over $350,000 with a surtax. Ill-conceived “soak the rich” plans devised by Congress tend to inspire a yawn, a sigh, or applause from the vast majority of citizens who don’t have to actually pay the lopsided amount of taxes that the “rich” pay. Well, as it turns out, more and more of us might actually be “rich” enough to have to chip in to help fund government-run health insurance for the masses.

The surtax proposed by Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) would stand independent of the income taxes Americans are already paying. Generally, a surtax is added onto an individual or business’s taxable income. However, in a maneuver to include more tax-filers into Congress’s double-tax treasure chest (or triple-tax if you invest in anything), Congress has decided to make the surtax applicable to your adjusted gross income, or AGI. Your AGI is what your income looks like before you take out deductions like state and local taxes, medical expenses, and mortgage interest payments. So it’s a higher number than your taxable income. (more…)

Tags: Charlie Rangel, congress, health care, health care reform, surtax

Video: Rep. Conyers (D-MI) Admits Health Care Bill is Indecipherable

Although we’d like to see all lawmakers read all the bills they sign, we understand Rep. Conyers’s (D-MI) exasperation when he says the 1,018 page House health care bill is indecipherable without a a pair of lawyers to translate it. So maybe each lawmaker should get a whole team of lawyers to help read it?

For taxpayer’s sake, let’s hope these lawyers don’t charge by the page: at $1.3 trillion, the bill clocks in at $1.264 billion per page.

Better yet, lawmakers should write a bill that makes health care portable and affordable…and decipherable.

Watch it by clicking here.

Tags: congress, Conyers, House, lawmakers