Fix Health Care Policy

Unions Insult Taxpayers with Obamacare Subsidy Request

Labor union leaders, who are big supporters of President Obama and were big proponents of his health care reform law, want taxpayer dollars to help pay for the increase in their health care costs due to Obamacare.

There are many provisions in Obamacare that will raise the cost of insurance in both the individual and employer markets. To name just a few of these provisions: no pre-existing condition exclusions, no cost-sharing on certain preventative benefits, children can stay on their parents’ plan until they’re 26, and no cap on medical benefits.

It should surprise no one that adding benefits and restricting cost-sharing adds considerable costs to health plans.

However, it appears the unions were too busy supporting Obamacare to do the math. Unions are now asking for a reprieve from the higher costs in the form of taxpayer subsidies for their lower income workers with employer-sponsored insurance. However, the subsidies are only intended to go to those purchasing coverage in the new exchanges, not to anyone with employer-sponsored insurance.

To be clear, they want taxpayer subsidies to offset the cost of their insurance while non-union workers in the same predicament would not receive help.

This request should insult every American taxpayer. These unions are using their political clout to ask for special treatment under the law at the expense of taxpayers.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: benefits, Cadillac tax, cost-sharing, health plans, labor unions, ObamaCare, subsidies

Obamacare’s 18 New Tax Hikes

Not only did the President and his partners in Congress take $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare, but they also raise taxes by $836.3 billion to pay for it, with $36.3 billion hitting Americans in 2013 alone. Here’s the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation‘s (JCT) updated cost of the Obamacare tax hikes and penalties.

To read about more of Obamacare’s negative effects, click here.

Tags: Cadillac tax, Congressional Budget Office, employer mandate, Individual Mandate, Joint Committee on Taxation, Medicare cuts, ObamaCare, tanning tax, tax hikes

Side Effects: Obamacare Fueling Higher Insurance Costs

Despite all the talk about how Obamacare would lower health care costs, it’s already becoming clear that it just won’t be the case.

The Indianapolis Star reports that companies can expect employee health insurance costs to rise even faster. “Driven by worries about the economy and possibly the effects of health-care reform, [health insurers] are raising rates this year for family coverage through employer-sponsored plans… from 8 percent to 21 percent, which is considerably higher than the 5 percent increase the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2009.” (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, employer-sponsored plans, higher insurance costs, ObamaCare, Side Effects

Side Effects: Higher Health Insurance Taxes

Union bosses howled about one Obamacare tax hike: the levy on “Cadillac” health plans (expensive plans rich in benefits). The problem with this tax, as they see it, is that it hits the very plans often enjoyed by their rank-and-file.

Ever eager to please the unions, Democratic leaders added a “fix” to the reconciliation bill the president will sign into law today (Tuesday). It delays the unpopular tax to 2018. The pols are touting it as a scaled back version of the tax. But even the “fix” is broken.

While the tax won’t bite until after the president leaves office, “scaled back” it is not. The revised version raises the threshold for plans that would be subject to the tax. But it also indexes the threshold to rise with the general inflation rate. (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, ObamaCare, premium tax, scaled back, Side Effects

Reconciliation Bill Adds Even More Taxes

A jubilant President Obama put his signature on health care legislation yesterday, but the work isn’t done quite yet. The U.S. Senate must pass the Reconciliation Act of 2010, making a number of tax changes to current law.

By signing the legislation, Obama already broke his campaign promise not to raise “any form” of taxes on families making less than $250,000 per year. The reconciliation bill adds even more taxes for Americans — an estimated $52.3 billion over 10 years, according to a new analysis from Americans for Tax Reform.

ATR’s Ryan Ellis spoke at The Bloggers Briefing yesterday about the reconciliation measure: “We lost a major fight on Sunday. That fight is lost; President Obama has signed it into law. Rather than wallowing … and waiting until the election, we have a fight this week on the floor in the Senate. Do we want to have an additional tax increase on top of the tax increase that has just been signed into law?”

(more…)

Tags: Americans for Tax Reform, Cadillac tax, campaign promise, low-income families, more taxes, ObamaCare, Senate Health Bill

A First Look At The House Health Care Fix: More Bad News

In their feverish effort to enact the Senate health bill, the House leadership recently released their 153 page bill to fix the underlying 2,409 page Senate legislation through the budget reconciliation process. As a matter of health policy, there is little that is substantively different between the Senate bill and this “fix it” bill. A closer look at the fine print shows that the latest version would only make the massive and unpopular Senate health bill even worse.

Based on a preliminary review of the key provisions, taxpayers should be aware of the following features of the legislation.

More Spending

– The House reconciliation bill increases taxpayer subsidies and lowers cost sharing for individuals receiving a federal subsidy to buy health coverage. This change adds to the overall cost of the bill, while depending on unproven savings and tax hikes to pay for it.

– Instead of removing special deals, the bill extends additional federal funding to all states for Medicaid. This “fix” is supposed to replace the scandalous requirement that federal taxpayers fund the Nebraska Medicaid expansion. In both case, however, the burden is back on the backs of federal taxpayers. (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, federal bureaucracy, House reconciliation bill, individual mandate penalty, job killer, Medicaid Expansion, Medicare cuts, Medicare investment income tax, more spending, Senate Health Bill, taxpayer-funded abortions

ObamaCare Will Break the Bank, Not Cut the Deficit

The White House and its congressional allies are trying to suggest that the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate proves that their health-care plan is fiscally responsible.

But, in fact, the latest CBO projections confirm — again — that the President’s health plan would pile more another unfinanced entitlement program on top of the unaffordable ones already on the federal books.

According to CBO, the new entitlement spending in the plan would cost $216 billion by 2019, and then increase by 8 percent every year thereafter. In other words, the President’s plan would stand up another health entitlement program that will grow much faster than the nation’s economy or revenue base. The changes the Democrats would make to the Senate-passed bill would make the entitlement program even more expensive. (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, Congressional Budget Office, deficits, double-counting, Medicare cuts, new entitlement spending, ObamaCare, President's proposal

Morning Bell: Dead Legislation Walking

Another day, another stream of health care fantasy from the White House. A quick look at two health care events from yesterday, one in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and the other in Tawas City, Michigan, clearly exposes the yawing gap between the Obama administration’s health care rhetoric and cold hard legislative reality. First in Glenside, President Barack Obama turned up the volume on his already tired “final push” for health care reform. In addition to the usual litany of false claims about the legislation in Congress (in fact, you don’t get to keep your doctor, it isn’t paid for, it doesn’t reduce costs) President Obama also repeated his new line from his doctors-in-lab-coats address last week:

“We have now incorporated almost every single serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care … Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill…”

But, as we pointed out last week, there is one not-so-minor difference between the Senate bill and the President’s new proposal: the Senate bill actually exists. Now, Democrats may be telling their conservative counterparts that they will have reconciliation legislative text in front of the Budget Committee by tomorrow, but don’t hold your breath. The “fixes” that the White House is promising wavering House Democrats they will make all sound easy at first glance: 1) scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies; 2) closing the Medicare D loophole; 3) boosting insurance subsidies; 4) increasing Medicaid payments; and 5) fixing the Cornhusker Kickback. But when you take a second look, you see that all of these “fixes” will cost more money. Just look at the Cornhusker Kickback which the President chose to address, not by taking away Nebraska’s special Medicaid payments, but by extending those extra Medicaid payments to every state! Every single item in the President’s proposal either increases spending or reduces new revenues. And he didn’t put forward any way to pay for them. If passing health reform were as easy as giving away free candy, Obamacare would be law already. Finding a way to pay for all these fixes is going to be just as difficult as every earlier effort to pay for this bill. So don’t expect any solutions anytime soon. (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, Cornhusker Kickback, ObamaCare, President's proposal, Rep. Bart Stupak, Senate Health Bill, taxpayer-funded abortions

The President Health Proposal: Taxing Investment Income

In preparation for today’s bipartisan Health Care Summit, President Obama released his own version of health care reform earlier this week. The President’s proposal includes several high-ticket provisions for expanding coverage. Since he has promised time and again not to raise taxes on the middle-class in order to pay for health care reform, the President’s bill imposes a Medicare tax on the investment income of high-individuals to off-set some of the cost of expanding Medicaid and financing other provisions of his health agenda.

But, as Heritage analysts Karen Campbell and Guinevere Nell explain in a recent paper, these new taxes would have widespread adverse effects for all Americans, not just the wealthy that they target. This is partially due to the very nature of a tax: (more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, Health Care Summit, Medicaid, Medicare tax, ObamaCare, President's proposal

JCT Says Obama Health Plan is a $414 Billion Tax Hike

President Obama keeps rolling out the tax hikes. In his budget released earlier this month, excluding the tax hikes he assumed to pay for health care, he called for $1.3 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade. Now in his recently released health reform plan, he calls for even more tax increases. Today, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) released their analysis of the tax increases in the President’s plan. According to the JCT, the plan will raise taxes by another $414 billion between 2010 and 2019. The taxes the President Obama proposed hiking are as follows (the year the tax kicks in and the amount the tax will raise between 2010 and 2019 are in parentheses):

– Require information reporting on payments to corporations (2011 – $17.1 billion)

– Exclusion of unprocessed fuels from the cellulosic biofuel produce credit (immediately upon passage – $23.9 billion)

– Codify economic substance doctrine and impose penalties for underpayments (immediately upon passage – $4.9 billion)

– Increase Hospital Insurance portion of the payroll tax and apply it to investment income for families earning more than $250,000 a year ($200,000 for single filers) (2012 – $183.6)

– Excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans valued at more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families (2018 – $32.7 billion)*

– Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs (2011 – $33.4 billion)*

– Impose excise tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices (2012 – $20 billion)*

– Impose annual fee on health insurance companies (2014 – $59.5 billion)*

– Excise tax on indoor tanning services (2010 – $2.7 billion)*

– Limit Health Savings Accounts (HSA) (2011 – $5.0 billion)*

– Increase taxes on unqualified distributions from HSAs (2011 – $1.4 billion)*

– Limit Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) (2014 – $11.4 billion)*

– Eliminate deduction of expenses allocable to Medicare Part D subsidy (2012 – $2.6 billion)*

– Limit deductions for medical expenses (2013 – $15.2 billion)*

– Higher taxes on compensation above $500,000 paid to officers, employees, directors and service providers of covered health insurance providers (2013 – $0.6 billion)

– Higher taxes on certain health organizations (2010 – $0.4 billion)*

(more…)

Tags: Cadillac tax, health savings accounts, higher taxes, Hospital Insurance, Joint Committee on Taxation, ObamaCare, President's proposal