Isn’t real insurance reform considered a vote getter from their own constituents?
Don’t Republican voters want their own insurance to cost less and pay out more reliably?
They seem to think all Republican voters are in love with the insurance industry.
How about actually giving a cite to back up your ridiculous assumption?
I’m not sure it is ridiculous. Under the guise of tort reform, Republicans have supported a cap on jury awards, yet if anyone suggests a cap on premiums, they sputter about the free market. Jury awards are part of the free market under our legal system. You can’t have it both ways.
No, jury awards aren’t part of the free market. They are simply the government assessing damages. It is outside the free market.
In general, GOP plans on health insurance would either provide incentives for the purchase of health insurance (like Bush is now proposing), the creation of HSAs, or reducing regulation on health insurance companies. All these are good for consumers. Reducing regulation on health insurance companies helps to make health insurance more affordable.
It always amazes me that liberals somehow think that increasing regulation and mandates on health insurance is good for consumers. All it does is drive up the cost of premiums, making it more difficult for individuals and small businesses to afford insurance. Look at Maryland, where Democrats have mandated a variety of regulations and restrictions on health insurance. Our premiums are high and 92% of people are covered by only two companies – the massive government involvement in our system have driven other companies out of the state.
If insurance companies were willing to cover things, why would we need regulations? 
Regulations aren’t put in before insurance companies are in the market. They’re put in as a response to what the insurance companies do to the market.
Because consumers do not purchase their own insurance policies. Government gives a tax break to businesses who provide employees with insurance. This distortion of the marketplace has been going on since the 1940’s and is the root of much of our health insurance problem. If people were able to buy their insurance directly without suffering a penalty, we’d see a much more responsive insurance market.
Well, many mandates are put in place because a well-funded special interest lobbies to put them in place.
The problem with HSAs is that they are typically linked to High Deductible Health Plans. High Deductible Health Plans cherry pick insurance risks.
Most insurance regulation is done at the state level and the regulation that insurance companies seem to find most obnoxious is the capital reserve requirements that different states impose (NY being the prime example). Insurance companies don’t just have Republicans in their pockts, they have pretty much everyone in their pockets.
How so? Why to any greater extent than non-high-deductible plans?
Prior to HSA’s it was virtually impossible for my sister to be insured. Now, she can insure herself for less than 10% of her gross income. It involves a lot of very difficult health-care choices including settling for generic anti-depressants and paying for most of her primary care out of pocket, but at least she has millions of dollars of insurance to fall back upon should another catastrophic event befall her.
Maybe this thread is as good a place to ask my question as any-- one of the key points of this plan is to give a tax break to those who do not get health insurance from their workplace. From what I’m reading, this tax break isn’t a break at all, since these people do not already pay a tax on which to get a break. It is a new tax on those whose employers pay a part or all of their insurance.
I’m thinking I can’t be right about this because I keep reading about how ‘it’s a step in the right direction to help those who are working uninsured’ , yet , from my understanding, it’s not a step in any direction for the working uninsured. They will be in exactly the same place they were before this ‘break’.
It’s like charging 1 dollar more for gas and telling people who don’t have a car that they are saving a dollar a gallon for the gas they never use.
I forgot the most important part-- and then telling people to go buy a car with this new found ‘savings’.
From a brief look at the news
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyid=2007-01-21T011140Z_01_N19343305_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-HEALTHCARE.xml
the proposal is to add taxes only to the most expensive of insurance plans. These plans are taxed on everything above $7.5k for individuals and $15k for families. Right now these generous health packages (avg family package is $11.5k) are offered to employees as additional compensation because they are not taxed, and therefore are cheaper than increasing salary. An additional effect of these plans is to drive up the cost of health care because individuals no longer pay any significant portion of their healthcare costs and are encouraged to use the most expensive treatments without looking at the cheaper ones. The additional dollars would give tax breaks to people who buy their own health insurance, and who currently do not get such breaks. Sounds good to me personally. It would reduce the total cost of getting health insurance and it seems likely that folks would take advantage of it.
It seems that a more appropriate car analogy would be to charge an additional dollar for gas to those who drive SUVs and sports cars (and burn more gas). These dollars are used to subsidize gas for people who only drive themselves to work and back.
Car analogies are like cars, you can only drive them so far and so hard before they break down.
That’s a lot of words to say that it is a tax increase that the administration is calling a tax break.
How, exactly, are these tax increases being used to give those who buy insurance themselves a break? Is the government going to use this insurance luxury tax to start a healthcare plan for the working uninsured? Are the taxes raised going to be given to the working uninsured to be used for insurance? Because I see nothing here to support this.
What I see is a penalty for those who have insurance (or ‘good’ insurance) with the hope that penalizing the insured will get them to not use insurance and then, somehow, someway-- this, in turn, will get insurance companies to lower their premiums.
Or-- to overextend the analogy-- taxing the gas on SUV in the hopes that it’ll get the car companies to lower the prices on their economy cars.
Biggirl. Right now we all subsidize the purchase of healthcare insurance when purchased by the employer by making that income used to purchase it tax exempt. Those in the highest income brackets get the biggest subsidy. Those who attempt to buy healthcare insurance on their own get no such subsidy.
Most people pay taxes. Under this proposal an individual who buys their own healthcare insurance will get a tax credit. This tax credit must be paid for and the proposal is to pay for this tax credit by reducing the subsidy paid for the purchase of “gold-plated” plans by the highly compensated.
It is a bit of a wimpy step but in the right direction. The employer-provided healthcare insurance model is fatally flawed. It is intrinisically inefficient. It contributes to fragmented care. And it subsidizes the purchase of healthcare insurance in a fashoin graded such the wealthiest arre given the most subsidy, the middleclass less, and those whose jobs do not provide health insurance (usually the lower middleclass) are given no subsidy at all. We can distribute the $200 billion we annually spend on this tax subsidy in a more equitable fashion.
Not understanding how the subsidy is attached to income. Far as I know (I worked in health insurance for over 15 years-- first for Empire Blue Cross & Shield and later at a small, doctor run ins co) the premiums are set by the risk pool. There are experience rated large groups and formula rated large groups. People who buy their own insurance are still put into large groups. The price is the same. The subsidy comes into play when your employer helps pay for this insurance.
This subsidy is not income based at all. It is based on how generous your employer is.
And what are these ‘gold-plated’ plans? I do know that many CEOs and partners get extra insurance perks larger than those of the rest of their employees. I also know that they pay for these perks. The insurance cost more than the regular insurance given the employees. You pay more, you get more.
But, again, the price of insurance is not set by the government. The government does not subsidize the insurance of the wealthy. The price of insurance for those who do not get insurance from their employer will not go down at all-- in fact, it may go up because all those healthy people who paid extra for nothing will now drop those extras if they have to pay taxes on it-- causing the risk pool to get worse, raising the price on all premiums.
Now, if the uninsured will actually see dollars from this plan, will it make a difference? If you live in Brooklyn like I do, the cheapest insurance you can get for an individual (let alone a family) is 7441.56$ a year. That’s over 600$ a month. What kind of credit is the government talking about here?
Do you see how much a family plan costs in Brooklyn? This is not any fancy, bells and whistles, “gold-plated” insurance plans. These are your run-of-the-mill, high co-pay, doesn’t-pay-for-fancy-crap-like-lasik, insurance coverage. The cheapest of these plans is $35,000 a year.
Can you name a place – any place, in the U.S. or abroad – where it has actually worked out that way?
Subsidy is currently linked to income as such- nicer jobs have nicer health care benefits. This includes a higher employer contribution, which is not taxed. That means that instead of offering Joe Bigbucks an additional $20K a year, we can contribute a lot more to his health insurance than your average company contributes for your average worker. For the purpose of illustration, lets say the employer pays $15k of his $20k plan, instead of paying $5k of a $10k plan. This effectively gives Joe $10k additional income untaxed, as I see it. You say that it is only based on how generous your employer is, but there is a high correlation between high paying jobs and generous employers.
These plans are “gold plated” in effect. Yes, the CEO deducts more from his paycheck to get it, but the company also puts up more of their money. It is fine that they deduct more paycheck, but the additional employer contribution is in effect an untaxed raise.
If healthy people drop extras they don’t need, I presume that they will still average at least slightly less use of insurance (cost will dissuade some from things like LASIK and other elective procedures). This lowers the total cost of insurance. Yes, some burden is shifted to the people who need and keep the extra coverage, but not all of it, and that doesn’t distinguish it from any other kind of insurance.
I do not know how much the average uninsured American is willing to pay for insurance, but it is a safe bet that most of them will see more benefit from this plan than Brooklynites(?) You can still get a plan cheap enough to fall under the tax benefit, but if you do get a $20k ($12.5k individual) plan, the taxes only cover $5k of it, even if the employer was already paying 100%. However, to say that this will hit wealthy urban areas the hardest does not distinguish it from any other progressive redistribution of wealth. It is also the case that places like New York have much fewer uninsured as a percent of population.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/sahie/maps/aaUninsure2000.pdf
Places that are already highly insured are not the ones meant to benefit. This one redistribution is simply limited to insurance on both the collecting and payout side. (and maybe I am confused, but 2 adults and 2 kids seems to be $17.6k for health insurance plan of greater NY)
Look again at the rates for Brooklyn (an adult and child is NOT the same as a family plan, if there are 2 adults you can have two individual adults or a family plan. If you have one adult and any number of children you can have the adult plus child plan. If there are two adults and any number of children, you must take the family plan)-- again, these are NOT gold-plated plans. These are basic plans for hospital and medical. Nothing fancy here.
Now, if this reform would like to classify Brooklyn and Brooklynites as rich people living in a wealthy urban area (median household income in 2003 $30,000– notice the gap in how much insurance for a family cost as compared to how much the median family makes) AND as highly insured (notice the difference between the insured of NYC as compared to the rest of the state and the country) then you can understand my skeptism.
Now, lemme see if I get this straight. The plan is to tax people on the insurance their employers pay for them in order to give a tax credit to those who cannot afford to pay for their own insurance. From what I see, those people will still be unable to afford insurance and therefore, will not see any ‘tax credit’. My original understanding still stands. It is a tax increase that the administration has somehow packaged as a tax credit-- and people are swallowing this.
Biggirl, we discussed this quite a bit in the other thread in GD on the topic. Reading it may help you understand what you’re missing.
The SOTU speech only reinforces the OP’s thesis. I mean, medical malpractice lawsuit “reform”?! :rolleyes: