A Rare Political Entry
Posted By Kathleen David on January 24, 2007
I tend to keep any of my thoughts on politics off of this web log for various reasons but today is going to be an exception.
If you don’t want to deal with me and my personals political views, I suggest that this is not an entry for you to read.
Fair warning.
I am grateful that we have health insurance with pretty good coverage.
OK when did health care become part of taxable income? Or even thought of as another thing from our paycheck that gets taxed? Considering what we have to pay in for Social Security (which I know won’t be there when I come of age) and local and federal taxes, adding on another tax seems absurd. Should I just hand all but $20.00 of my paycheck over? That is the way it seems to be going.
Bush wants to penalize people for having a company that provides them with good health insurance. He is using smoke and mirrors to make it sound like a good idea. Also he wants to make the health insurance burden (paying for it) on each individual worker to pay for out of pocket rather than health insurance through companies. This would give the companies much more power to tell people with problems to go somewhere else since you would no longer have anyone at your back to help you.
He wants to tax any monies over 15,000 (for a family 7,500 for an individual) paid for health insurance. I can tell you for a fact that I have paid well over 7,500 in a year for private health insurance and over 15,000 a year for the family and a COBRA deal (which is only good for 18 months kids). So by his plan I would be taxed on money that I have already paid to the insurance company.
It boils down to in this day and age that health insurance is NOT a luxury but a necessity to keep on living. The uninsured find themselves in debt up to their eyeballs if something goes south health-wise and the insured can even find themselves filing for bankruptcy because they have used up all the monies allowed by their health insurance.
The insurance companies only want to insure healthy people because it doesn’t cost them much to do so. Once you are sick or have a condition that might need further medical attention, they want nothing more to do with you and will figure out any way to not pay you for the care you received. And G-d help you if you are pregnant or have kids. Kids cost a lot of money to raise so they are healthy.
Now Bush is trying to give big companies a way out of paying for health insurance. Again the way he is doing it is very sneaky but it is there.
And medical savings accounts are not the way to go. It just mathematically doesn’t work. Especially since you lose the money you put in the next year if you don’t use it. Also once they are depleted that’s it. You have no recourse to find funds for the medical help you need to stay alive.
This is not healthcare reform but “let’s see how we can screw the middle class this week so they can join the poor and get it over with” and it is so wrong.
I am writing my congressmen and Senators with my concerns. I strongly suggest you do the same before we all see another line of money being taken out of our paychecks.
The OTHER thing that makes my blood boil is the suggestion that we let patients er…consumers, comparison shop for appropriately priced medical treatment. Excuse me? If I am sick, I am NOT in a position to research my options, weight the risks, look up the value in consumer reports, and THEN go get treatment. I’m sick or hurt NOW. And I rely on my DOCTOR to have the expertise to suggest an appropriate course of treatment. And if you want to even TRY to find out the costs of a simple procedure, I wish you a long life and good luck. You’ll grow old waiting to get the info.
Jackie
Kath,
I agree with most of your comments, but I’d like to clarify a few things:
1. Bush’s proposal isn’t going to tax you if you spend the money yourself on health insurance; in fact, it will shift the tax burden so that those who are working, but are not covered by health insurance from their company, will be able to deduct the cost of health insurance. Currently, this is only true if you are self-employed. The biggest concern I have is that the inflation-index for the caps will not keep pace with the real (medical) inflation, so eventually, even those who currently would not pay tax on their health insurance benefit will end up paying.
2. Medical savings accounts come in two varieties: flex-spending accounts, which do disappear each year, and HSA’s, which do not. With HSA’s, you can accumulate the money from year to year; the downside is that they typically require you to have a high deductible on your health insurance ($2500 is typical, I think.) They pitched HSA’s at my company this year; for some people, it makes sense, because my company gives employees free health insurance but they must pay to cover their families (which can run $400 or more a month.) With an HSA, family coverage would be much cheaper for them — if they can afford the high deductible. HSA’s are supposed to be portable; they are like 401K plans, in a sense. If you change jobs, you do not lose the money in your HSA. And, you can save your receipts for years and send them in later, when you REALLY need the money.
The NPR story I heard that covered this mentioned that Bush’s only support for this proposal comes from conservative economists, who believe that tighter coupling between what health care costs and what consumers spend will eventually drive down health care costs. While I’m not an economist, I did take a full year of it in college, and there is so much inertia and inelasticity built into the system that this will never happen, for a lot of reasons (which I won’t enumerate because this post is too long already.)
Doug Burton (big fan of Peter David, so I also read the other blogs on his website.)
The only upside I can take away from Bush’s “plans” like this is that at this point in his political career, he can’t possibly get them enacted. Screwing over middle America’s health insurance is political suicide, and nobody’s willing to commit political suicide for a man whose approval rating is dipping below 30%.
I know there are powerful, entrenched interests over there that will do everything possible to prevent this from happening, but you guys *really* need a National Health Service over there. I’m 52 now and have been extremely fortunate never to need medical attention of any consequence. My wife, who’s American, had major surgery to save an eye a few years back at Moorfields, a world-class eye hospital. Since the NHS is funded from general taxation this cost us not a single penny. I asked her what would’ve happened had she still been living in the US at our current income level. She replied: “I’d be blind.”
‘Socialized’ medicine. I would not be without it.