It’s Even Worse Than You Think
This is James C. Capretta and Yuval Levin, writing in The Weekly Standard:
The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a "public option," which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.
It’s hard to believe this is really happening.
Agree with Neil. This should be another “beam me up.”
John, read further; the really newsworthy part of the Weekly Standard piece concerns this tidbit:
two households, identical in all respects including income, would be treated very differently depending on whether they got their insurance through the exchange or through their employer. At twice the poverty level, a family of four today makes $44,000. Such a family insured through an exchange would pay no more than $2,200 for a policy that could cost $12,000, so it would receive a federal subsidy totaling nearly $10,000. The family next door, meanwhile, with the same income but with health insurance provided through the workplace, would receive an implicit tax break for the $12,000 in employer paid premiums worth only $3,600. That’s a bonus of more than $6,000 for being in the exchange–or a penalty of $6,000 for having employer coverage. This disparate treatment would be widespread. The Census Bureau counts 102 million people under age 65 in households with incomes between 150 and 400 percent of the poverty level, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that only 20 million of them would receive insurance through the exchanges in 2014.
Such disparate treatment of lower income workers would create a powerful incentive to flee employer coverage for the exchanges.