McCain wants to take away your employer paid insurance benefit

Reposting this article from Brass and Ivory because I can't believe this issue isn't getting the kind of play it deserves. I really really don't care if Palin was for or against a non-existent bridge in Alaska - I wish she would tell the truth about it - but ultimately it's only relevance to me is as a reflection of her character.

This kind of stuff though ... this directly effects every single one of us. So can we stop talking about lipstick and start talking about this?

The very foundation of McCain healthcare plan calls for your employer to STOP providing group insurance for you and your co-workers and if they don't - you're going to get a personal tax increase.

See he doesn't think that healthcare benefits are a good idea. He wants you to have to go out and shop for healthcare insurance like you do your car insurance. He has some half brained idea that creating an open market for healthcare insurance will be the answer (because open markets worked so well for the mortgage industry)- and to make it happen he is willing to PENALIZE YOU PERSONALLY with HIGHER TAXES if you are receiving employer based healthcare.

This article from the NY Times says it all

McCain’s Radical Agenda by Bob Herbert

Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?
These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.
A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.
There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense — lipstick, celebrities and “Drill, baby, drill!”
For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.
“It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.
According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”
The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”
Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.
While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used “to help pay for your health care.”
You may think this is a good move or a bad one — but it’s a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?
The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)
Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.
When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.
That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.
The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”
Yet another radical element of McCain’s plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless.
In a refrain we’ve heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these “needless and costly” insurance regulations.
This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans’ ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.
You would think that with some of the most venerable houses on Wall Street crumbling like sand castles right before our eyes, we’d be a little wary about spreading this toxic formula even further into the health care system.
But we’re not even paying much attention.

Comments

[Sarah]

So for all those people who work extra hard to find jobs with health insurance, he is just going to whack them in the head. This is just making me so mad. I don't qualify for private health insurance so my husband had to take a lesser paying job at a smaller hospital so that we would qualify for group health benefits and now McCain wants to punish us for that. Unbeleivable.

[T with Honey]

So if I'm following the campaigns correctly I have a choice between the candidate that wants to tax me if I get my health insurance as a benefit from my employer in order to create more competition and force doctors into getting even less compensation for their efforts and more denial of coverage to protect stockholder interests and another candidates who wants to force everyone into government run health care which increase overhead, flood hospitals and doctors offices and will eventually take away my choice of physician, hospital and have elected officials with no medical background dictating which procedures and medications I should be taking.

Really, can't we get anyone better to run for office?

[Lisa Emrich]

Yeah, don't get me started on the whole health insurance thing. It's basically what put the fire under me and why I started my blog in the first place. :)

I responded with the following to an individual's question and concern regarding Obama's proposed Health Insurance Reform specifically. and I offer it here in response to the comments on your post.

Obama is not proposing Universal HealthCARE as in socialized medicine.
Here are some of the things Obama would plan to implement, including plan to increase number of doctors:

• Create a National Health Insurance Exchange through which individuals could purchase the public plan or qualified private insurance plans.
• Require participating insurers to: offer coverage on a guaranteed issue basis; charge a fair and stable premium that is not rated on the basis of health status; and meet standards for quality and efficiency.
• Require plans of participating insurers to offer coverage at least as generous as the new public plan.
• Expand funding to improve the primary care provider and public health practitioner workforce, including loan repayments, improved reimbursement, and training grants.

You can find a detailed summary here: http://www.health08.org/FINAL%202%20CANDIDATES%20Side-By-Side%...

More analysis and commentary can be found here: http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2008/09/comparing-jo...

You can also find information regarding McCain's proposals at the above links.

For an explanation of the current tax subsidies given for employer-sponsored health benefits, read this report: http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/7779.pdf

One thing to keep in mind is that McCain wants to offer $2500 (individual) or $5000 (family) refundable tax credits for people to purchase their own insurance plans. However, the average cost of a family plan under the current employer-sponsored system is estimated to be $11,500.

Lots to digest.

[JV]

T w/ honey:

Just a comment on your last point. When you compare the tax credit to the average cost of insurance you are comparing apples and oranges. If you are taxed on the family average of $11500 (your number). Your tax bill would go up $2875 (25% bracket) to $4025 (35% bracket). The tax credit of $5000 would offset this and actually put money IN most people's pockets. The richest people (35% tax bracket) would reach the break even point if their insurance bene's were worth $14285.71 or more ($1190.47/Month).

As someone who already pays for his own insurance without a tax break (like everyone else gets). I'm all for the plan that would actually reward me with tax credits for being frugal with my insurance rates and staying healthy. The more people know what insurance actually cost employers, the more it may actually drive down costs.