Two responses:
- Not trying to solve all problems. Trying to solve SOME of the problems for SOME of the people.
- Allow someone to carry the deduction over several years, like other losses can sometimes be carried.
That was sort of my point. There are people who don’t derive any benefit from a proposal like this because they can’t afford to do what they need to be eligible for the benefit. It’s like vouchers for private schooling - if you have enough money to send your children to private schools, you’re obviously not at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Programs like this are obviously going to be popular with middle class voters. But looking at the big picture, they make no sense. If you’re going to hand out government money to people, you should be handing it out first to those who are the worst off.
If I’m going to toy with a potentially expensive band-aid, I want one less discriminatory with regard to which bleeding it stops.
Exactly what I came here to post. Markets adjust to these kinds of things, and if I know the average person is going to save 15% off the cost of my product, then the product price is going to rise 15%. Maybe not exactly, but you can’t just do a static analysis and assume that you can fiddle with the market and that the market isn’t going to adjust to the fiddling.
Given that it is the middle class that gets screwed on income taxes, I am happy to help them.
The very poor get Medicaid. The middle class gets screwed. The upper class does not care.
Next - I am NOT handing out government money. I am letting the middle class, plus some others depending on where you draw the line on who pays taxes, keep more of their money in recognition of their personal health care expenses. This is money that if it were paid via their employer, would already be pre-tax. Right now we give the edge to the employer based payment system and leave the others out in the cold.
I want to break that link.
Actually, a lot of poor people DON’T get Medicaid. Being poor doesn’t make you instantly eligible to get it. So the poor who don’t get Medicaid really get fucked over in this scenario.
You want to break that “link” you talk about? Go to a single-payer system.
That won’t happen anytime soon, and we both know it. However, finding a tax deduction MIGHT get through the next Congress.
Politics is the art of the possible, and Single Payer is not going to get passed in the next two years in the USA, if ever.
So far I have yet to hear any strong arguments except for a possible price increase and the unknown total cost. Everything else is discussing other issues, but are not in themselves an argument against my proposal. They are instead just comments about OTHER groups that need help.
Whether the group you speak for needs help is a valid question. One could also argue that a tax cut only for the extraordinarily rich would be good too, if one determinedly ignores that the reduction in government income could be better allocated, or even might be better left in the hands of the government.
Thing is, if the actual solution isn’t politically possible, that doesn’t make bad ideas any less bad. It just means that there’s no solution we will accept. I just don’t see Yet Another Tax Cut as the solution for anything; I see it as a symptom of the problem.
Yep. This idea applies the most solution to the least problem.
This doesn’t even solve some of the problems for some of the people. This idea is like painting a scratch on the Hindenburg’s paint job. You might think you’re fixing something, but the disaster that’s looming makes it just a huge waste of time and money.
No man is an island. A tax policy affects all of us not just you (or just the middle class).
Somebody up above said that medical costs are over two trillion dollars a year. Make that tax deductable and you’ve removed a huge amount of federal revenue. That’s going to have an effect. Do you raise taxes by hundreds of billions to make up the difference? Do you cut government programs by hundreds of billions of dollars? Either way you’re putting a burden on somebody and it’s irresponsible not to figure out who that’s going to be.
Most likely the burden will be put on the poor, as I said. They won’t receive the benefits for reasons we’ve already mentioned. But they’ll either see programs for them drastically cut or they’ll have their taxes drastically raised. Either way you’re putting a burden on the poor to benefit the middle class.
Now again, I’m not saying the government has an obligation to help anyone. Some would argue it doesn’t and everyone should rely on themselves. But if the government does step in and start helping people, I think it should be helping the poor first because they need it the most. It definitely should not be charging the poor to help the middle class.
Fine. You come up with an estimate and describe why yours is better than mine.
I will also point out that my estimate doesn’t include new users to the system, what with so many people being uninsured. If your proposal is to subsidize health care, then health care spending will go up, the tax deductions will go up, and the cost to the government will go up.
As a rough ballpark of cost, I’m going to stand by my estimate until you start coming up with better numbers.
Yeah, I get it - YOU don’t really want to solve the larger problem (which, by the way, would save you, personally, even more money than your tax deduction scheme) you just want help getting your kid braces or whatever. Because that’s so onerous compared to, say, some poor diabetic not being able to afford insulin. or other medications. You do realize it’s your tax money that eventually winds up paying for such peoples’ amputations and what not?
Yeah, at first glance it does seem that it would be more effective to withdraw all tax exemptions from medical costs. A level playing field, transparency of cost, less bureaucracy, better aligned incentives.
Yeah, but you are solving problems for the people who don’t really have a problem affording health care.
I understand that it si still an improvement over what we have now but I think we’ve spent quite enough time on solutions that make sense for the wealthy.
During the Health Care debate here in DC, the huge elephant in the room that everyone was intentionally ignoring was Universal Health Care and Medicare reform. The Democrats were trying to concoct a system that would mimic the beneficial effects of universal health care without actually having universal health care. They made an incremental step towards medicare reform but the furor over eliminating medicare part C and all that talk about “death panels” 86’ed any desire for health care reform.
There are plenty of good solid ideas that hyealthcare thinktanks have come up with but none of them are politically palatable. universal Health Care is the MOST palatable of these suggestions if that tells you anything about how palatable the other suggestions are.