Tag: "tax"

Zeke Emanuel Praises the Coburn/Burr/Hatch Bill – Sort Of

First there is this:

Affordable-Care-ActSenators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch deserve credit for developing this plan. Putting together a proposal to reform the American health care system is hard and politically courageous. And while it is lacking in important details, this plan contains some interesting ideas that might have enabled bipartisan compromises had they been offered in 2009, when I was a health care adviser to the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act was being debated.

But then there is this:

On a more individual level, this is what the Republican plan means: If you are one of the 150 million Americans who get their health insurance through an employer-sponsored plan, get ready for a big tax increase. For a family in the 28 percent tax bracket (earning around $150,000 per year), according to my calculations, it would add up to about $1,470 per year.

Ouch! More here.

Jan 29, 2014 | 16 comments | by

Coburn II

ObamaCare is widely perceived as a Rube Goldberg contraption that treats people in arbitrary and unfair ways. A Republican alternative, therefore, needs to be clear, easy to understand and based on principles that starkly contrast with ObamaCare. It must not be “ObamaCare light.” The first Coburn health reform proposal (the Coburn/Burr/Ryan/Nunes bill) fits this need to a tee.

TomCoburn-APUsing updated numbers, the bill would offer a $2,500 tax credit to every adult and $8,000 to every family of four for the purchase of private health insurance. Since this is roughly what it costs to insure new Medicaid enrollees, if people had the option to use their credit to buy into Medicaid, this would insure universal coverage — something ObamaCare doesn’t come close to doing. Under this approach:

  • The CEO and the worker on the assembly line would get exactly the same help from government.
  • Everyone would get the same help, regardless of where health insurance is obtained — at work, in the market place or in an exchange.
  • Everyone would get the same help — whether you work full-time or part-time, whether you work for a small firm or a big firm, whether you are in a labor union or not.

Plus the bill is an economist’s dream — getting rid of all kinds of perverse incentives in the current system and in ObamaCare. Even Jason Furman, the president’s chief economist, has endorsed this approach.

Now there is a new proposal from Senator Coburn. Here are the main differences:

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Jan 27, 2014 | 27 comments | by

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

Te1tu7pmwfxbajkvyuruhhe NSA collects 200 million text messages a day.

Electronic medical records: They don’t save money and they don’t improve quality, but they do allow hospitals to bill more. HT: Jason Shafrin.

Judge rewrites ObamaCare law to allow people to get tax subsidies in the federally run exchanges. See Background posted by Michael Cannon.

Jan 16, 2014 | 17 comments | by

Why the Labor Market Isn’t Recovering

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This graph is from Casey Mulligan, who explains:

Between 2007 and 2012, there had been little net change in the tax rate on full-time work because the 2011-12 payroll tax holiday largely offset the increases from SNAP and mortgage modification. I think this is an important reason that weekly work hours recovered from the recession much more quickly than employment has.

But a year ago the payroll tax holiday expired and, more important, beginning this week incomes earned will reduce the subsidies that families might hope to receive as part of the new insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act.

For these reasons, the recovery of the workweek from the recession cannot be taken for granted.

Jan 08, 2014 | 15 comments | by

New ObamaCare Taxes

The newobamacareTax taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual.

The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.

There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov website. (More)

Jan 03, 2014 | 11 comments | by

Oh No! The Republicans Are Going To Tax Your Health Benefits!

If even The Wall Street Journal covers reforming the tax code to allow individuals to own their own health insurance in “Republicans Shy Away From Their Own Health Plan” (and it does), we have a big hill to climb before we can eliminate the discrimination against individually owned health insurance. According to the WSJ, Congressional Republicans are more gun-shy than ever of a reform that would give households tax credits to buy health insurance, instead of biasing the tax code in favor of employer-based benefits.

This risk-aversion is a consequence of the fact that ObamaCare is causing millions of people to lose their health benefits. Although many of these victims have individual policies, many are also insured through their employers. Because President Obama’s guarantee that “if you like your coverage, you can keep it” has been exposed as false, Republicans have been freshly reminded how fearful people are of change.

This has pushed them back into a corner, defending the tax discrimination favoring employer-based benefits and against individual tax credits, according to the WSJ.

This is a real shame. Individual tax credits were a feature of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, President Bush in 2007, and were proposed as long ago as 1995 by John C. Goodman and Mark V. Pauly.

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Dec 19, 2013 | 13 comments | by

One Reason Why So Many People Are Not Working

Here are Casey B. Mulligan’s estimates of the impact of emergency unemployment compensation ending in December 2013:

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Dec 02, 2013 | 12 comments | by

ObamaCare Fan Learns She Has Second Thoughts

Jessica Sanford, a self-employed single-mom, was so ecstatic at being able to purchase affordable health coverage for her and her son that she wrote President Obama a fan letter. The president even acknowledged her letter and quoted from it in an October 21 speech.

Ms. Sanford later discovered the state website she had used to calculate her subsidy had made an error:

Originally it said Sanford and her child would get a whopping tax credit that would reduce their total premium to $169 a month. Now the state is telling her it goofed — twice — and she has to pay full ticket. There may even be a third goof involved: At least one health-insurance broker says she may qualify for a tax credit after all, albeit a small one.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation Subsidy Calculator, family of two with an income of just under $50,000, living in Washington State would be required to spend nearly $4,750 per year on health coverage before it qualified for a subsidy. This is more than double what she was originally told she would be required to spend.

Nov 19, 2013 | 11 comments | by

An Idea Whose Time Has Come!

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Ramesh Ponnuru (American Enterprise Institute) and Yuval Levin (Ethics and Public Policy Center) discuss how to reform health care the right way. Their suggestion is a good one:

  • Replace the tax exclusion for employer coverage with a uniform tax credit.
  • The credit would be sufficient in most cases to buy catastrophic coverage; but after-tax dollars would be required to upgrade to a Cadillac plan.
  • Let the poor either choose Medicaid or use their tax credit and additional funds out-of-pocket to buy private coverage.

The proposal Ponnuru and Levin described is almost identical to the National Center for Policy Analysis’ Alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

Ponnuru and Levin explain:

Conservative policy experts have long proposed such approaches, but Congressional Republicans, with a few honorable exceptions, have not taken them up in recent years…

Some Republicans think that political success requires nothing more than watching ObamaCare fail. But if the new system quickly implodes, that would be all the more reason to have an alternative on hand — other than another leftward move toward single payer. And it might not implode so quickly.

Nov 15, 2013 | 13 comments | by

The “Belly Button” Tax

We haven’t said much about it at this blog, but it amounts to $10 billion a year and the unions hate it, as so do many businesses. As Doug Badger explains:

In order to raise this $10 billion, section 1341 of the health care law requires an assessment of $63 on each of the roughly 159 million people who are covered under group health plans. This is a transfer of $10 billion from people who will not get coverage through the new exchanges next year to the estimated 7 million people who will. The money is intended to fund reinsurance arrangements, helping to help pay the claims of people who run up unusually high medical bills.

Badger, who was George W. Bush’s lead health care policy advisor, is critical of this and other transfers to insurers who participate in the exchanges.

Nov 01, 2013 | 17 comments | by
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