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Americans are generally comfortable with the idea that health insurance should be tied to having a good job, subsidized by taxpayers.
The ignorance is astounding.. Tell me how an employer based benefit, is subsidized by the taxpayer?
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Originally Posted by freemkt
Why should low-wage workers subsidize health insurance for the middle class while having no coverage of their own?
And I thought it couldnt get any better, but you proved me wrong..
how does a low wage worker who pays no income tax, subsidize health insurance for th emiddle class, and where the hell do you get the impression they have no coverage of their own? Ever heard of welfare?
The ACA which impacts medicaid is not a "good" fix for the gigantic cost of heatlh care in the U.S. which is single handedly bringing our nation to its knees. One in six of our dollars goes through the health care system in some shape or fashion. Most of it is spent needlessly to enrich a few. Much of it is corporate theft of our health care dollars.
Single payer would have been a more effective approach, but only because comparing our system to that of every other industrialized nation results in a savings. And it is fought tooth and nail by politicians sold out to the health care lobbyists.
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according to the database kept by OpenSecrets between Pharmaceutical and health product industry, hospital and nursing homes, health professionals and health services, HMOs, or more broadly Pharma/Healthcare/HMO, the total lobby dollars spent between 1998 and 2012 was a staggering $5.3 billion, or nearly three times greater than the second most generous industry: insurance, and well above Oil and Gas at $1.4 billion, and Securities and Investment at $1.0 billion. Is it becoming clearer why the US government has few qualms about unsustainable taxpayer funded healthcare spending, especially when there are so many current benefits accruing to the politicians who see so many billions in benefits from passing lobby-friendly laws now (by which we mean generous taxpayer funding, the bulk of which benefits the healthcare industry's bottom line)?
Here’s a completely different idea, one that might actually work. Let’s give every American health insurance, but only for truly rare, major and unpredictable illnesses. In other words, let’s cover everyone but not everything. It would take a generation to transition fully to such a system, but eventually the most routine and expected medical treatments, from checkups and minor illnesses all the way to common chronic conditions and expected end-of-life care, would be funded from our individual health savings; only the most major needs — for example, cancer, stroke and trauma — would be paid out of insurance.
Defining insurable events more narrowly and enabling Americans to use the premium savings to build health savings would reduce the distortions inherent in our insurance approach. Most importantly, it will also compel providers to compete on the basis of price, quality and service, as they meet the one force that creates real incentives for good performance, innovation and safety: the consumer.
David Goldhill is the chief executive of GSN, a media company, and the author of “Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/op...pagewanted=all
Such an approach would allow employers to pay their employees more--far more than they do now. Read all of the article in the last link, how David Goldhill estimates that one of his newly hired employees, aged 23, will pay 1.8 million dollars in health care over the course of her life.
We may not have been in this predicament, at least not as quickly as we have arrived at it, if we had elected Teddy Roosevelt to a third term in the White House. One item of his major platform---universal health care with the government as the single payer.
Single payer is pro-business:
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“It’s about being American and doing what’s right,” Swan says. “What’s right is not paying a 30 percent premium to the insurance system and receiving sub-standard health care.”
Business owners are also supporting single-payer health care. For 25 years, Jack Lohman owned a company that provided cardiac monitoring services to hospitals. Today, he’s a co-founder of the Business Coalition for Single Payer. A “lifelong Republican,” Lohman argues that conservatives should support single-payer because it’s pro-business.
“For the same 16 percent of GDP that we are spending on health care in the U.S.,” he says, “we could provide first-class health care to 100 percent of the people.” And single-payer would “get health care off the backs of corporations so they can be more competitive with products made overseas.”
The ignorance is astounding.. Tell me how an employer based benefit, is subsidized by the taxpayer?
And I thought it couldnt get any better, but you proved me wrong..
how does a low wage worker who pays no income tax, subsidize health insurance for th emiddle class, and where the hell do you get the impression they have no coverage of their own? Ever heard of welfare?
Both political parties like to provide subsidies and expenditures in the form of tax breaks, because they cause the measure of net tax revenue to fall without increasing the measure of spending. Thus, they give the appearance of reducing government’s size. For this reason, tax subsidies have strong political appeal. In fact, however, tax expenditures can actually expand government’s interference in the economy, partly because they induce changes in taxpayers’ behavior. Also, like direct spending, tax expenditures must also be paid for through higher taxes elsewhere.
Imagine, for instance, a government that did only two things: it provided tax expenditures for energy equal to 20 percent of national income, and it collected an income tax on workers. Then it would have to assess tax rates high enough to collect 20 percent of national income from workers before it granted back the tax breaks for energy.
A childless adult working full time at minimum wage pays over $500 annually in federal income tax, and pays a higher effective federal income tax rate than many middle class families with 3x - 5x greater income plus child tax credits and various other tax breaks.
Said childless minimum wage worker does NOT qualify for welfare, and also does not qualify for Medicaid, and many low-wage employers (especially the smallest) do not provide coverage to their workers. Burger flippers are expendable and interchangeable, no need to pay more than the market will require.
Tax-free health insurance is the single largest tax break in the United States, estimated to cost the federal government more than $1 trillion over the next five years in foregone revenue.
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About 60 percent of Americans under the age of 65 are covered by an employer-provided plan. The tax break for employer-sponsored health insurance is undoubtedly a major reason why most American workers (and their families) receive their health care coverage through their jobs. And tens of millions of Americans pay substantially lower federal income taxes than they would if health benefits were taxed in the same manner as cash wages.
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Health Care Reform
