Bush's idea of health care reform was to give more of your tax dollars to insurance companies. Which they did.
#52 | Posted by Corky at 2009-09-23 11:07 AM
Another Bush deflection of Kennedy straight out of your ass? Maybe you should read up on your own party leaders.
'Bipartisan Cooperation on Health Care Is Dead on Arrival'
Worst of all was the five-page memo distributed by Sen. Edward Kennedy to Democratic colleagues that ought to embarrass a man who considers himself the Senate's leading health-care expert -- a compendium of half-truths, unsupported assumptions and outright lies. Kennedy reverted to the hackneyed rhetoric of class warfare, asserting that the president's proposals will do nothing for working families, give new tax breaks to the rich, increase the number of uninsured and encourage everyone to buy less insurance coverage than they should have.
In fact, all of these are almost precisely the opposite of the truth.
The president's health plan would, in fact, put a cap on a $200 billion-a-year tax break that now goes disproportionately to those with the most generous and costly employer-provided health insurance plans. It would redirect a small portion of that break to those who have less generous coverage or those who have to buy their own insurance because their employer does not offer it. For a few million of the roughly 47 million Americans with no insurance, it may also make the difference between being able to afford basic insurance or not.
The fact that some of those who have these rich policies happen to be members of auto or postal unions doesn't change that the president's proposal would make the tax code more progressive, not less. They are the aristocrats of the working class who, like lawyers, investment bankers and journalists, earn more in tax-free benefits each year than uninsured janitors earn in taxable wages. And whatever modest tax increase they might face from the cap on tax-free health benefits, it is certainly less than the tax cuts they got from Bush that Democrats are so eager to rescind.
Almost every health economist agrees that the tax subsidy for employer-paid health insurance is not only unfair but that it also encourages people to buy too much insurance, consume too much health care and pay too much for both. Bush deserves praise for having the political courage to confront the issue.
Would any real solution also require finding billions of dollars more to subsidize the purchase of health insurance by low-income workers and getting states to reform dysfunctional markets for individual and small group insurance? No doubt about it.
But anyone seriously interested in health reform would welcome the president's proposal as a basis for negotiations, raising public expectations and increasing pressure on the president to embrace more comprehensive reform. Unfortunately, that is not the approach of Messrs. Stark, Rangel, Reid and Kennedy, who apparently prefer demonizing the president and grandstanding on the issue until the next election.
Haven't we had enough of this?
www.washingtonpost.com
