Opinion in the news
Health care reform: what next?
In its Sunday editorial the New York Times sketched out the main differences between the House and Senate health-care bills and calls on legislators to move beyond politics and finish the job of overhauling the U.S. health care system.
It is time to put the public interest first, because there are valuable features in each bill that warrant inclusion in the final product. The House bill, which is superior in many critical respects, does a better job of making health insurance affordable; the Senate bill has stronger provisions to restrain escalating medical costs.
The editorial provides a nice summary of the pros and cons of the approaches the two bills take in dealing with such issues as financing, mandates and how insurance exchanges would work.
The Times editors conclude.
The final shape of the legislation will be constrained by costs and politics. Conventional wisdom holds that the final product will have to be close to the Senate version lest that fragile 60-vote coalition be ruptured. The Senate bill as it stands is a big improvement over the status quo, but if lawmakers truly want to serve their constituents rather than play more politics, they would include some provisions from the House bill.
To learn more:
Why the “Cadillac tax” is not a tax
In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Jonathan Gruber, a health-care economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, defences that the proposed tax on high-cost health plan, which he says will not only help control health-care spending but boost the incomes of middle class workers.
Gruber argues under current law these high-cost “Cadillac” plans are in fact subsidized by the U.S. tax payer.
Under current law, if workers are paid in wages, they are taxed on those wages. But if they receive the same amount of compensation in the form of health insurance, they are not taxed. As a result, the tax code has for years provided a large subsidy to the most expensive health plans — at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of more than $250 billion a year. To put this in proportion, the cost of this tax subsidy to employer-sponsored insurance is more than twice what it will cost to provide universal health coverage to our citizens.
In the past, Gruber says, when the cost of health insurance has been reduced, employers have passed the savings along to their workers in the form of higher wages and he expects that same will happen again.
Gruber concludes:
So in the end, we have a policy that provides the necessary financing to pay for subsidies to low-income families; induces employers to buy more cost-effective health insurance, lowering U.S. health-care spending; offsets a bias in our tax system that favors more expensive insurance; and raises wages by $223 billion over 10 years.
To learn more:
- Read Gruber’s column ‘Cadillac’ tax isn’t a tax — it’s a plan to finance real health reform
Seattle Times decries “Cornhusker Kickback” deal
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb)
Today the Seattle Times denounces the deal made with Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska to subsidize his state’s Medicaid program to the tune of an estimated $100 million in order to get his vote for the health-care reform bill.
The Republicans called this the “Cornhusker Kickback.” It is a cute way to label it corruption — which it is. It is the bending of a federal law in order to buy the vote of one legislator.
Federal law, the Times notes, is supposed to be uniform.
It’s a concept that shines through several places in the Constitution, which calls for a “uniform rule of Naturalization” and “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies.”
To learn more:
- Read the Seattle Times editorial: Sen. Nelson’s ‘Cornhusker Kickback’ raises constitutional questions.
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