…maybe. Personally, this would be great for me, and great for almost every person I know who is paying for their own health insurance. I pay for health insurance for my family of 4, it costs a little over $400 per month. It’s pretty good coverage too, vision and dental are covered, as are prescriptions. Doctor visits are covered 100% up to a certain point each year, my co-pay for an injury or accident visit to the ER is manageable, and the deductible on the plan only kicks in for the big stuff, there is a hard out of pocket maximum and if I’m unlucky enough to suffer the really big stuff (like heart attack, stroke, cancer, etc…) it won’t cost me a dime. At roughly $400/month, that’s just over $5,000 per year. Which, of course, I write off on my taxes. I was smart enough to set up an HRA so I can deduct out of pocket costs as well, but we’re a healthy family (knock wood), they tend to be insignificant. If this plan goes through, I’d be able to write off 15K instead of 5, which would be about 3K back in my pocket each year. (Very rough numbers) Very nice! That’s a nice chunk to stick in an IRA, or to take a vacation, heck, divide that by 12 and it’s $250 a month, if I subtract that from my health insurance premiums, they’re down below $200/month. That will make a big difference to a lot of people who are uninsured now due to cost.
However it’s the other part of the plan that’s going to raise a lot of people’s ire. Taxing their benefits? Oh, they’ll be out in force against that! The thing is, it’s not going to apply to most people. I’ve seen the numbers (I do not have a link to them, this was in an industry publication), and less that 5% of those covered by employer’s health plans have plans that cost more than 15K/family and 7.5K individual. Even then the tax is only on the difference between 15K and the actual cost. Many health plans are overpriced because nobody every asks if the benefits are necessary ( Example: I went to the dentist for an abscess. He prescribed an antibiotic that cost over $100. Because name brands cost me significantly more than generics under my plan, I asked if a generic was available. He said sure and wrote me a script for amoxocillin. Cost me $8 to fill, less than my co-pay. I ASKED because I am aware of the various costs under my plan, if I had little or no co-pay for name brands I wouldn’t have bothered, and insurance would have paid over $100 where $8 would have sufficed.) or takes the time to learn what things actually cost. While this is far, far from the largest thing affecting high costs in the insurance industry, it does contribute. If this goes through, I think you’ll see that 5% scaling their plans back just a bit so that they don’t get hit with the tax. 15K/year still buys an awful lot of health insurance. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I have never once sold a policy that costs that much or more. (I do not work with employer supplied insurance however. I know there are some out there that do cost that much) So…some drawbacks to the plan, but they are fairly minor, IMO.
However…I have no idea how one would sell this plan to the American public. Most people are going to hear the words “taxing benefits” and go ape shit without bothering to find out that it doesn’t apply to them. Many others aren’t going to be able to get past the fact that it’s Bush proposing it, no matter what it says. This isn’t universal health care, it’s not socialized medicine. I know a lot of you want that, can we limit this thread to a discussion of this particular proposal as compared to the current system and not “This sucks because it’s not X” please?. X isn’t on the table. If X ever comes to the table, it will be germain to the discussion, but now it’s not. Right now this is on the table, and I’d welcome your opinions on it.
(If we can discuss the proposal as it sits and on it’s own merits with a minimum of the obligatory Bush bashing, I’d be grateful for that too. I want to talk about the plan, not the person proposing it)
Tax breaks for people who can’t afford health insurance? They probably don’t pay much income tax anyway.