Quote:
Originally Posted by HeavenlyOne
Coadie, I haven't read all of your posts, so you might have said something about it already and I missed it, but what do you think about the proposal Obama is trying to make in regard to everyone being required to have health care, and what is your opinion of what might happen should this take place?
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There are so many issues in your question.
The CEO in one of the large hospital chains mentioned transfer of costs. If you lose 20% on medicare patients, you can make it up on others with insurance. If we are all on Federal insurance, who pays if the providors lose money? No one will pay retail.
Required?
Under the baucus plan, there will be payroll tax on family plans that exceed 8,000 dollars. There will be a fine if you don't have coverage
There will be a mandate if you apply for coverage to cover pre existing. So I pay the tax on no insurance, find I have a hernia, go buy coverage and cancel it after surgery.
In employee benefits language, there is an expression called "adverse selection" A friend that was a Prof of mine is now in a huge personell department. They have a low level worker that came to work for them because they cover drugs and the family has twins that spend 17,000 dollars a month on medication. The enterprise is self insured. The employee expense including benies is over 200,000 dollars a year.
The next secret is they want to treat company paid insurance as taxible income.
Gross pay 30,000
Health ins 13,500
Taxible income 43,500
Take home actually goes down. No one points that out.
See why the Fed wants mandatory? More income to tax. And they will say they are NOt raising taxes. But this bumps you to a higher bracket.
The trick is to take some of the numbers from the media, then process them considering tax consequences. Now the net impact makes these plans look very ugly. Obama can play with words. He can leave the tax table alone, get you a raise (with inflation) and bump you up to a higher tax percentagge rate. Then he says he did not raise taxes.