164 Million Ways To Kill Real Healthcare Reform: Tax Employee Health Benefits

[Better Believe It]

- Such as tax will kill any chance of passing a healthcare bill if it includes a real public insurance option. The currently insured public in their overwhelming majority will oppose any healthcare plan that taxes their employer covered benefits. I can just see the anti-healthcare tax TV commercials now.-


Health insurance ‘haves’ to pay for ‘have-nots’?
Senate considers curbing tax-free status of employer-provided benefits
By Tom Curry
MSNBC
June 8, 2009

As part of a health insurance reform package now before Congress, some of the 164 million Americans who are covered by employer-provided health plans could be asked to give up at least part of the longstanding tax exemption granted to such compensation.

It’s an idea likely to be met with howls of opposition if it makes it into the final version of health insurance legislation that President Barack Obama is pushing.

The idea of limiting the tax break for employer-provided insurance gained momentum last week, when Obama told senators that he’d consider it as one ingredient of the health insurance reform bill he wants Congress to pass by early August, when the Senate starts a one-month recess.

Will you end up with more taxable income?

While details of such an approach are still sketchy, it would likely involve employees paying tax on a percentage of their employer-provided health benefits. So if Congress decided that all such premiums in excess of $11,000 for family plans would be taxable income, and your company paid premiums worth $16,000 for your coverage, you’d have to pay taxes on $5,000.

Obama’s new openness to the idea stands in contrast to what he said six months ago as a presidential candidate, when he harshly criticized his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, for proposing that employer-provided benefits should be taxed.

Scolding McCain in their debate on Oct. 15, Obama said, “This is your plan, John. For the first time in history, you will be taxing people's health-care benefits.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31106408

[ThomCat]

1. It's sick that anything that hurts low and middle income people

can be taken seriously in Washington, but even the most timid efforts to regulate any industry is considered politically impossible except under extreme circumstances.

:wtf:

Regressive taxation and funding schemes always seem to be popular, but just try to spread out the taxes or fees to reach the wealthy and the screams of outrage never end. :(

I'm glad that Obama is against this from the start. After everything he has done to give our money to insurance companies, to work with insurance companies to keep them massively profitable, it's nice to see him siding with US on this. I hope Democrats line up and oppose this too, and stick to their guns. The Public Option will need to be paid for somehow, but our party can come up with something much better than this.