Go Ahead, Tax those Benefits, It's Central to the Health Plan
Submitted by seachange on Fri, 2009-07-03 06:17.
Rose Ann DeMoro, Huffington Post, July 2, 2009 Enough already on the hand wringing over the plan to start taxing employee health care benefits. The tax is not a threat to the type of reform plan expected to emerge from Congress. It's a central element - to pay for the massive public bailout of the health insurance industry and as a backdoor way to cut costs by discouraging people from seeking medical care. Here's the basic scheme of how this complicated plan is supposed to work: Everyone not presently covered will be forced to buy private insurance - the ostensible solution to the nettlesome problem of the 45 million uninsured Americans and the 20,000 people who die every year ... Go
Heavy!!!
Heavy!!! But, alas, true and very well written. Her editorial needs to reach a wider audience. She did forget to say that the subsidized folks will pay with tax credits, which is also very important as this decreases SS earnings and is also not possible for those who require assistance. I haven't figured out yet if the subsidized portion will be considered taxable income or the taxpayer pays the entire shebang and gets a tax credit. No aides will respond to this. Also, a self-employed person (sole proprietor) will be considered an employer and subject to employer insurance or the employer penalty unless (per the first Kennedy draft) this person files a request with the Gateway (Connector) that he/she be considered as an individual and meets a specific IRS code. I haven't read the full text of the Kennedy-Dodd bill that just came out, which is the version after mark up for the CBO, so don't know if this part is still in there. It probably is. What the heck does this all have to do with health care?Rhetorical question. All the drafts I've seen so far - Baucus, Kennedy-Doody and House - are close replicas of the Massachusetts plan except for the FPL limits for subsidized and expanded Medicaid, and the tax credits I mentioned above. The American people need to be educated now so they can rise up against this. No bill would be better than any of those currently on the table. Also, Obama said all Americans will have choice. My friend Terry (the nurse) said today on the phone that he lies - or is clueless - because, the way the national plan is set up, everyone will get what they can afford (or can't afford) or will pay costly penalties. A Kennedy health-policy aide told me yesterday that if someone falls into a plan that contains estate recovery, so be it. John Olver's aide called to say I should ask either Olver or Markey (or both) to write a bill to get rid of estate recovery. I say that if Congress goes forward with a national law, and it contains plans that have an estate recovery program (regardless of the fact that these plans will be implemented on a state-by-state basis), and, furthermore, if Congress forces people into plans knowing that there are no doctors for everyone (as in Massachusetts with nothing done about it yet despite S.2526) that we should get an injunction. And those two reasons are barely the tip of the iceberg. By the way, I've received two letters from Kerry about estate recovery - the first said that this is a state issue, so not his problem. I quickly corrected him on this. The response to my correction said that there is no national estate recovery program. Nice try, Kerry. I will be responding to this disingenuous reply by early next week. Meanwhile, Bigby's Deputy Counsel sent me a response that was totally unacceptable, so Friday I faxed another letter saying so with further demands, which I cc'd to Dehner and Kirwan - the other two geniuses involved in the trickery - and mailed the hard copies a few days ago. So far, my letters have all been forwarded by Bigby to Jamie Katz. These people are really evil, Sandy. - Dianne