Bush Seeks Shift in Health Coverage - washingtonpost.com

Call me a cynic, but any plan from this president to address the healthcare/insurance problem in the country is pretty much a non-starter for me. I have spent most of my adult life being insurance poor. By that I mean, insurance has always been a priority, even when it meant having less for everything else. Car insurance, home insurance, health insurance...Even credit insurance on big dollar purchases. Now the President wants to tax my insurance premiums...Another bad idea from the Great State of Taxes...oops, I mean Texas. Don't get me wrong, I'm a proud fourth generation Texan, not a carpetbagger from Connecticut like some un-named GW's. But in Texas, the Republican run government raises it's money on sin taxes and professional fees. Now the President wants to do the same...

President Bush will propose a deep tax break for Americans who purchase their own medical insurance and would finance it with an unprecedented tax on a portion of high-priced health-care plans that workers receive from their employers, according to the White House.

And there you have it, from the man who never has and never will have to worry about his families healthcare...A plan that will save us all money on our health insurance by making us take a plan that covers nothing or taxing us for having a plan hat might save our lives.

Let's not even think about the fact that the whole concept of health insurance is now terribly out of sync. Insurance companies spend the majority of their management costs on figuring out how to not pay for something. The doctors and hospitals have a two tier pricing plan. One for the insurance holders that have rates negotiated by the company's and one for the non-insured that have rates at least four times as high. The uninsured can't afford these prices and end up in the emergency room which they still can't afford.

The new tax measure would attempt to roughly equalize the benefits of people who have health insurance, whether they buy it or receive it from employers.

The estimated 150 million people covered by employer-provided health insurance are not taxed on the value of their health insurance, regardless of how much it is worth. The average employer-provided family health insurance plan costs $11,500 a year, administration officials said -- three times what it cost 19 years ago.

Under the president's proposal, workers who receive employer-provided health insurance would have to pay a tax on the cost of their benefit above $15,000, the threshold proposed by Bush for the tax break. For instance, if a person's health insurance costs $16,000, he would pay a tax on the $1,000 difference.

I don't know about you, but every year my employer comes to us with higher deductibles and higher premiums. Sadly, I am sure I fall into the "Cadillac" plan category that the President wants to tax. My question is, where does the President's own plan fall? will he now have to pay a tax on his plan? I doubt he has premiums deducted from his paycheck...

Since we don't want to fix the problem, our even address the issues, not really, let's just level the playing field and make everyone's plan the same...Bad. Why, if the President wants to equalize the benefits, doesn't a single payer plan even enter the picture? Or how about a single administrator plan? Be it government or private, one administrator should have some benefits of scale. Or how about a healthcare tax? Set a percentage of pay as the entry into the plan and make it mandatory...The same percentage across the board, no deductions, no exemptions everyone must pay to play. No, not from this President. His coverage is paid for for life...Along with a big percentage of Congress. Do you really think they have a vested interest in fixing the problem? I don't.

Source: Bush Seeks Shift in Health Coverage - washingtonpost.com