Word: taxed
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...congressional lawmakers scramble to find ways to pay for health-reform legislation that could cost upwards of $1 trillion over the next decade, there is probably no funding method more unpopular with the American public than taxing health benefits. Employers have been providing tax-free insurance to workers since World War II, when federally mandated wage freezes led to a bonanza in this form of nonsalary compensation...
...About two-thirds of nonelderly Americans get health insurance through their employers, and despite the fact that the tax break is regressive - the more expensive your employer's health-insurance plan, the bigger the break you get - very few of them would look kindly on reforming the system. With that in mind, some lawmakers have proposed capping the amount of employer-sponsored health insurance that could be provided tax-free - leaving only workers with pricey, so-called Cadillac health plans worth north of $25,000 a year subject to new taxation. But even this isn't exactly guaranteed to have...
...taxing insurance companies? That's a little easier to sell to voters, which helps explain why the powerful Senate Finance Committee has reportedly pivoted from taxing workers to embracing a plan to tax the insurers who offer the most expensive 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...
...idea for an excise tax on insurers was put forth by Finance Committee member Senator John Kerry and modeled on a similar 1994 proposal from Senator Bill Bradley. President Obama has said as recently as July 22 that he's open to capping the tax benefit on health plans in some form. (Read "The Five Biggest Hurdles to Health-Care Reform...
...with every aspect of 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...