On 10/3/06, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 10/1/06, Robert Donovan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On both sides it makes sense that they're trying to maximize income. No income, no company, no health care. But you know... My auto insurance isn't that complicated. It's pretty clear what my auto insurance policy covers and what it doesn't, and it's usually pretty clear whether any given incident falls under the covered category. Why can't health insurance be like that?
I think healthcare would be like that if the consumer were dealing directly with the insurer and the doctors, which rarely happens in our current insurance system. Your
theory sounds great on the surface, and we certainly need some kind of massive reform. > Robert Donovan. Pleased to meet you. -todd
There is one final thing I'd recommend, which I didn't deal with in my last post to avoid forking into a discussion of the tax system, but here goes. My plan calls for removing the tax-exempt status of employer paid health benefits and replacing them with an equal tax-exempt status for those payments if they're paid as cash wages to the employee. Since employees are not curently taxed on in-kind health benefits, forcing employers to pay the value of employee health coverage as cash wages would result in a preservation of a tax-break for the employer, but an increase in taxable income for the employee. Rather than try to deal with this via healthcare reform, this increas in taxable income to the employees could be effectively countered by allowing employees to deduct the value of their wages comprising their healthcare benefits. This preserves the incentive for the employer to provide health benefits and the employee to keep prices down on their healthcare. Those who were able to reduce their healthcare expenses below what they were paid for them would see a net increase in income without having to worry about being bumped into a higher tax bracket. I strongly suspect that this is the reason that reforms similar to this have not been enacted. At any given time, you could probably get half of congress to support the health reforms, but not the tax deduction, and the other half to support the tax deduction, but not the health reforms. Still, the cost of healthcare and health insurance is getting so ridiculous that I'd almost be willing to take the tax increase if it also meant I could get away from buying healthcare at the company store. Of course, that's just me. RD -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
