FixHealthCarePolicy

The President’s Health Summit Proposal: Rhetoric vs Reality

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

Obama’s Health Plan – Taxes, Taxes Everywhere

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.

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

Morning Bell: The Pelosi Blueprint for Government Run Health Care

The new House health care bill (H.R. 3962) unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. As written, the bill purports to cost only $1.05 trillion over the first ten years and is paid for by over $700 billion in tax increases and cuts to Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug payments. But as troubling as those numbers are, the scariest thing about the bill is the solid foundation it lays for a complete government take over of the health care sector of our economy.

The Washington Post describes the bill as “creating an expensive new entitlement program (subsidies to purchase health insurance) and dramatically expanding an existing one (Medicaid).” This is true by itself, but the Post later dismissively adds: “If you’ve noticed that we haven’t talked about the public option in the House bill, that’s not an oversight. For all the fury over the issue, it doesn’t matter that much; the CBO estimates that the government-run plan would actually have slightly higher premiums.” This is a breathtakingly naive statement by the Post and demonstrates that they have not yet fully grasped how all the different elements of the bill are designed to interact to produce President Barack Obama’s desired outcome. (more…)

Tags: 3962, Barack Obama, CBO, debt, deficit, entitlement, government takeover, Medicaid, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Health Care Plan, tax increases