The tax on gold-plated insurance plans is the last vestige of most economists’ favorite idea, eliminating the tax exemption for employer plans. The finance bill would impose a 40 percent excise tax on insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 a year for an individual or $21,000 for a family.

The white house budget director referred to this tax when he said:

“A key priority now, is to make sure cost containment holds up as we move through the legislative process.”

They call it a tax on “gold-plated insurance plans as if only CEO’s get them. What gets conveniently overlooked is that some companies, such as Zappos, provide excellent health care to all their workers and would be considered “gold-plated”. Some of the labor unions have also negotiated “gold-plated” plans. Although some would prefer to simply exclude those plans from the tax. After all, labor is the democratic base.

Naturally the healthcare and insurance industries don’t mind since it will give them money. What they opposed were the provisions that would allow Medicare to negotiate pricing on prescriptions.

Only in Washington could a tax we pay be considered “cost containment”. If you feel the tax is a good idea at least call it what it is. This is what sends me over the edge in the healthcare “debate”. The politicians talk about controlling costs as if they are trying to lower them. What they really mean is they want to control who pays.

Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, is ignoring the fiscally conservative democrats on his own committee and since he doesn’t have the votes to get the bill out of the committee without them he’s threatening to bypass the committee. And those Blue Dogs (fiscally conservative democrats) are threatening to turn the committee over to the republicans (according to Waxman).

I’ve always said out government is at it’s best when no party is in charge and they are forced to work  together or do nothing. Now there’s the added amusement of watching a party implode.

The big downside is that Mr. Waxman will get the bill he wants. The absurdity of this is apparent when you consider that Waxman is a rep. from California. A state that is essentially bankrupt and paying salaries and bills with IOU’s. Now Mr. Waxman wants to make the California excesses national and is ignoring the people trying to reign in costs. The democrats say they want this to be a bipartisan effort yet they can’t even come to an agreement among themselves and are threatening to propose a bill that did not get approved by the Committee.

You still think this will be real reform? I ask again, what’s changing except who pays and the (increased) amount of money going to the healthcare industry?

If the “reform” is supposed to lower health care costs then the following paragraph from the NY Times article needs to be explained:

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, has said he hopes to have a health care bill on the floor by July 27. That goal appears unrealistic, even though members of the Finance Committee said they had made progress in talks on how to pay for their bill, expected to cost at least $1 trillion over 10 years.

So a bill that costs $1 trillion will lower costs?  Sounds like an oxymoron to me. When they talk about lowering costs they just mean they’ll find new taxes to pay for it so the budget deficit won’t grow. Not all of that will come from taxes on personal income. Companies will get additional levies related to health insurance. Let’s lead the entire country down the path of the bankrupt automakers and the bankrupt California.

So, on top off all the deficit expanding bailouts and paying for the Iraq war we need to come up with another trillion bucks to add the insurance company and health care provider profits.

Why do we think we can control costs by forcing people to buy insurance but not limiting the profits of companies providing the services. Yes, a free market is better, but the reform bills kill the free market and are just a forced transfer of money. While I’m not a fan of government control, if you want to nationalize the payment system through taxes and forced payments by employers then nationalize the whole system (again, I think it’s a bad idea but it makes more sense to me than the current proposals). At best we’re removing any incentive for health care providers to lower costs and at worst we’re giving the health care an incentive to charge more.

And now the proponents of the bills are trying to ram them through before anybody has a chance to fully analyze them. Any law has unintended consequences, especially something this complex so even the best of intentions can lead to disaster. Yet we again have a government trying to push through their pet projects before they can be fully scrutinized. They care more about meeting a date on a calendar than coming up with comprehensive health care reform.

Out government is again failing to server the interests of the people it’s supposed to represent.

Guess who else has “gold-plated” benefits. All those union workers that Democrats count on for votes. But they don’t have to worry, Senator Baucus is proposing that health insurance in collective bargaining agreements won’t be taxed.  That’s right, the tax code is based upon who you work for.

The Bloomberg article includes many good reasons for not applying the tax to union agreements. But that’s a straw man to the real point – each and every one of those arguments applies to each and every other working stiff and is a reason not to tax them either, they aren’t reasons to tax non-union people.

I’m not sure what to be more pissed at:

• The Democrats, at least the ones proposing the exemption think they can get away with this blatent attempt to financially reward votes.
• That our politicians now think it’s OK to base taxes on who you work for. They don’t want to tax the companies, this money will be deducted from your paycheck.
• That our politicians think health care reform means taxing the people with good health insurance. Let’s face it, they aren’t taxing the “gold-plated” insurance of a few.
• That “reform” simply means spreading insurance to those who don’t have it and not lowering costs and improving service for us all. Because the health-care industry makes money off us being sick and companies are resisting price increases, reform is simply an attempt to bring in new customers and get others to pay.

I’d like to hope I’m wrong about one of those points, but with the broken system have today I rather doubt I am.