There’s never been any secret that if the US was willing to spend an extra $100 billion or more, it could subsidize health insurance for a lot more people.
He excerpts a new CBO report on health care subsidies. Read his whole post.
There’s never been any secret that if the US was willing to spend an extra $100 billion or more, it could subsidize health insurance for a lot more people.
He excerpts a new CBO report on health care subsidies. Read his whole post.
“If the government gives people free stuff, they will have more free stuff.”
Thank God this man got an economics degree, we never would have figured that out.
BTW, he seems to only be considering the direct net cost to the government. All the taxes on existing employer health plans, medical device tax, reduced Medicare reimbursement, etc that go to pay for the various reinsurance funds subsidizing the exchanges appears to be left off the list of “costs”. We taxed and reduced benefits to working people and retired white people to help subsidize health insurance for illegals and other minorities. For Core America, all of those things were costs and they got negative benefits out of them.
“Finding a way to trim back the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance by about half–with an emphasis on reducing the subsidy to those with higher income levels–could provide the revenues to subsidize health insurance for all remaining Americans who continue to lack it.”
There are various reasons to eliminate the employer health care tax exemption, but DO NOT call it a subsidy. It’s “taking less in taxes”. That’s not a subsidy, that’s stealing less. If you can convince me that any reduction in this tax benefit will be met with lower taxes for the middle class, so be it. But we all know that isn’t how this is going to go down. It will go down exactly like ACA went down. They’ll implement some means testing elimination of the benefit that hits the middle and UMC (UMC = people working 60 hours a week to afford a shoe box apartment in a great centralization city) hard, but there won’t be any equivalent tax break. It will just mean higher effective marginal taxes on people who work for a living.
The extra taxes will all go to provide greater subsidies for the NAM underclass. Those subsidies will attract more NAMs, and this will increase the cost of healthcare. Anyone who has looked at healthcare data knows that poor people are really sick and cost a ton more then middle class people who take care of themselves. Also, all of these “affordability subsidies” means they never have any incentive to price shopping themselves, so they make laughably expensive health care decisions of marginal or negative value to their health.
I’m more then willing to pay for universal healthcare…of people like me that generally try to act responsibly and are willing and able to contribute. If you get cancer or your kid is born with some defect, so be it, the rest of us will say, “there but for the grace of God go I,” and help you out. However, this only works when the population as a whole mostly contributes, mostly follows the rules, is quantitatively and qualitatively actuarially sound, etc.
ACA was a swindle that took money out of the pockets of Core America to subsidize a bunch of alien underclass. I’m not going be lectured that “paying less in taxes” = “subsidy”. You think the employer subsidy is distortionary? Find a way of eliminating it that isn’t just as excuse to theft by one group from another.