Word: costs
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...previous court filings related to Tenenbaum's case, Nesson has argued that the Digital Theft Deterrence Act is essentially a criminal statute, and consequently the large damages awarded—significantly more than the cost of legally downloading a song—violate the 5th and 8th Amendments...
...health-insurance plans. Doing so would generate some tax revenue - though far less than the $1 trillion-plus over 10 years that could be generated by eliminating the tax-benefit break entirely - and possibly help "bend the curve" (to borrow the wonky slogan du jour) of rising health-care costs. The theory is that high-end insurance that covers everything at little or no cost to consumers discourages those people from shopping around for less expensive care and encourages wasteful overuse of the health-care system...
...health reform, it's not nearly that simple. For starters, most large companies (1,000 employees or more) are self-insured, with a private health-insurance company merely acting as the benefits administrator. In these cases, Kerry's proposal would levy the excise tax directly on employers, whose extra cost burden could be (and many say most certainly would be) passed onto employees in the form of higher contributions to premiums, higher deductibles and higher co-pays. "It is not a tax on insurers," says James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, which advocates for employer-provided benefits...
...Senate Finance Committee has not yet introduced draft legislation, so it's still unclear what level of Cadillac health benefits would be taxed under the Kerry proposal. But those familiar with the committee's discussions say the tax threshold could be based on either what federal-employee benefits cost or the average cost of insurance nationwide. Nearly 20% of Americans covered by employer-sponsored health insurance have policies costing more than 120% of the national average, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation...
...they work for, what they do or where they work," says Chuck Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Of the Kerry excise tax proposal, Loveless says, "We're looking at it very closely and we're trying to calculate the cost of excise tax on our plans, but I do know it's going to hit some union plans...