Posts Tagged ‘tax treatment’
Health Care News
Obamacare: The Price Controls Begin
The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that, starting next year, health insurance companies must receive permission from the Obama administration before they can raise rates higher than 10%. As we warned before Obamacare even became law, this is a form of price control, a government intervention that has a long and well established history of failure.
Way back in 1993, Heritage Foundation scholar Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier was detailing the shortcomings of price controls in health care:
“Price controls would not work in health care because they attack the symptoms of runaway costs, not the cause. Medical costs today are soaring because consumers are largely insulated from them…and because the tax system discourages consumers from seeking good value for money in health care.” (Read more at The Foundry…)
Tags: health insurance, medical costs, ObamaCare, price controls, tax treatment
Health Care News
The Health Care Summit: Getting Reform Done Right
Thursday, Democrats and Republicans will convene at the President’s request to discuss the way forward on achieving bipartisan health care reform. In a recent paper, Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko discusses how congressional Democrats and the President can use this meeting to start over on health care reform by enlisting Republicans to pass legislation both sides agree on.
Says Owcharenko, “If the President is sincere and the summit is going to be successful, it must begin by setting aside the highly unpopular bills that the House and Senate have developed. Simply adjusting the magnitude of these proposals or adding new “conservative” provisions as suggested in the President’s latest proposal, does not change their fundamental direction.”
Polls show a majority of Americans stand in opposition to the left’s health care proposals, which fall short of meeting expectations established by promises made by the President. To restore the nation’s trust in Washington, Congress and the President should focus on areas of reform which have bipartisan support. Owcharenko suggests the following as areas in which to move forward: (more…)
Tags: entitlements, Health Care Summit, insurance, insurance reforms, ObamaCare, President's proposal, state-based reform, tax treatment
Key Documents
Back to Basics
Reforming American health care is an immense and complex undertaking. Heritages Dr. Stuart Butler writes:
If the U.S. health care sector were a separate national economy, it would be the sixth largest in the world–bigger that Britain’s entire economy. Imagine five bickering congressional committees trying to redesign the British economy successfully in just a few weeks.
Dr. Butler goes on to explain:
We must and can get health reform. But it will never be achieved if Americans are pressured to agree to Big Bang change on a ridiculously short timetable–and based on central planning, rather than on better incentives for American creativity and federalism.
Effective, bipartisan reform can be achieved if President Obama and Congress refocus discussion on three kinds of changes:
1. Promote State Innovation
2. Establish Fairness in the Tax Treatment of Health Insurance
3. Get Serious About Entitlement Reform
Tags: entitlement, health reform, state health reform, tax treatment
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