The Baucus mark-up of the Baucus Mark-up gives tax credits for the purchase of private insurance policies to persons who earn up to 4 times the federal poverty level. There is also a tax subsidy for cost-sharing, such as co-pays and deductibles. The money goes directly from the Treasury to private insurance companies. This is a perfectly stupid arrangement.
Normally, tax credits are available to people who owe taxes. At the end of the year, you figure out your tax bill, then you deduct the tax credit from the bill, and then you pay the difference. That isn’t even remotely going to work with people who need the subsidies: they don’t have the money to front the insurance companies their premiums, and they don’t owe enough taxes to recover the entire credit.
Senator Baucus has a solution (pdf). This tax credit is “refundable and payable in advance directly to the insurance company” (p 20). The idea is that when you do your taxes, the form requires you to calculate the premium credit you were entitled to get, and if your credit was too high based on your actual income, you have to pay part or all of the difference.
The cost-sharing subsidy works the same way. People advance refundable tax credits to pay their cost-sharing at a level which brings the actuarial value of the insurance they bought up to 90% for people making up to 1.5 times the poverty level, and 80% for people making between 1.5 and 2 times the poverty level. That money goes to the insurance company as well.
HR 3200 contains a similar idea, but at least it isn’t called a tax credit. Both bills will give the insurance companies just what they want: one of their blood sucking tentacles is inserted directly into the Treasury.
This is no different from any other corporate welfare program. A service that could easily be provided by the government is farmed out to private enterprise for private profit. It’s no different from the way banks inserted themselves into the student loan program, ripping off kids for loans that were already profitable and safe. It’s no different from Medicare Advantage, which pays insurance companies to provide Medicare. It takes years to get rid of ideas like these, ideas so blatantly stupid you have to wonder if there was corruption.
Why set up another equally stupid and even more expensive giveaway? We have systems in place to pay doctors and hospitals directly: Medicare and Medicaid. It makes sense to modernize and expand Medicare, some of which HR 3200 does. Dr. Dean made that a part of his 2004 platform. Medicare would work also. These systems can start work tomorrow.
What could possibly be the point of funneling money to the insurance companies? Oh wait: that is the point.
Related posts:
- Medicaid for All: An Alternative To Subsidizing Insurance Companies
- Only the Insurance Companies Want a Level Playing Field
- Raising Their Rates, Health Insurance Companies Put Themselves in a Box
- Stupak Amendment Could Likely Be Used by Insurance Companies to Discriminate Against Low Income Americans
- Former Insurance Industry Exec: Baucus Plan a “Gift” to Insurance Companies
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head/desk.
There’s a non-starter for you.
head/wall.
Do they think they are doing this in a vacuum? Do they think people don’t read? WTF?
Is there someone compiling a list of what needs to be stripped out of the Baucus bill when it is combined with the HELP committee bill? Or amended on the floor. This is a good candidate.
It’s as if the Democrats think the voters were for John McCain’s wealthfare proposals last year.
Many commenters here are asserting that Medicare for All is the right approach, and that we would start it by adding people over 55. I think that is a bad idea. Those people are high need people, and will be very expensive to insure. Most of them have something already.
Medicaid would work for the lower income people that are being added, and Medicare would also work. What makes no sense is forcing these people into the infested world of private insurance.
Oh, me too, kiddo. Double Head Bangers.
As If! What, you Arkansasians are stealing our lingo.
But, you are, of course, correct.
You said:
Those people are high need people, and will be very expensive to insure.
What is your evidence here?
MasterCard and Visa will be in line this afternoon, advocating direct government payments of tax dollars to their member banks. After all, the next big crash the financial markets anticipate is when the broke and near-broke, and those to whom credit ought not to have been sold in the first place, stop paying on their credit cards.
Rather than let late fees, penalties and usurious interest rates go unpaid, rather than let bank profits fall, and rather than reform an absurdly bank-permissive consumer finance regulatory system, the Dems will bail out one more industry that’s too big to fail.
If this keeps up, the Dems will own the no-tax and spend moniker that George Bush made his own.
so health care reform is really a bailout for the insurance companies
all for thee and nothing for we the people
Can we get someone to primary this Dino no offence Dean Martian
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
[Warning: we need a new thread to contain dosido’s rant.]
I hate these guys!!!!!!!!!!! All the years we rec’d FREE credit card offers (we did NOT take them) we told each other “wasn’t there a law against this?” “shouldn’t there be a law against this?” “is this good business???”
Hey, Visa and MC: PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for your business decision to offer credit to get people on your usury hook.
For this to work tax-credits (if any) must be completely decoupled from both consumer choices about the form of insurance coverage and any direct public subsidies which support those choices. The point of having a public option (and any choice between private insurance and PO) is to establish a type of synthetic competitive dynamic between different alternatives which will work to contain out of control cost growth. Since the government can, through direct subsidies or simply, through a combination of greater efficiency, lower per unit overhead, and lower profitability targets (as is the case with Medicare), influence the price of coverage provided by the PO, that PO will become the de facto price-setter for the industry. This should, in turn, encourage private insurers (if they want to survive) to become more competitive (and to force their ultimate care providers to become more competitive) in order to compete at the price-point established by the PO. Everything else, including any tax credits (why?), total free choice (no barriers to switching), no-denial policy/portability (a must), mandates (another must), etc, have to be applied evenly to these options, for this mechanism to work (except in limited cases). Moreover, the PO must have national scope and be able to attract millions of subscribers.
Hi Suz! I’ve been reflecting a lot on that phrase “A bailout for the insurance companies”. And, it finally struck me that this phrase, widely used, is not correct at all.
The insurance companies don’t need a “bailout”. They are already doing very well, thank you very much. So, this is kinda like extra frosting on the cake for them.
So, just to make it clear, I am not calling you out, Suz for your use of the phrase, not at all, because it has a certain familiar resonance. I’ve read similar, and nodded, yes, that’s right. But, I’ve been thinking lately about the exact meaning of the phrase, and thus your comment gave me the opening to respond.
This is about corporate enslavement of Americans, as Jefferson warned! Congress has now made the determination we are all property as was Dred Scott? My “Life” is now equated to a car, a piece of property to be insured? This is ” fucking disgusting” to realize “for profit” and “for profit/tax exempt” health insurance corporations treated as public charities for tax law purposes operate at the state level practicing discrimination at the state level just as slave owners in slave states usurped the constitutional rights of men and as the segregationist cried state’s rights in the perpetuation of laws which denied Americans due process and equal protection under the law. Corporations have “niched” themselves similarly!
The expanding and expansive “state government interests” construed as legitimate are undermining the individual inalienable constitutional rights of Americans just as slavery and segregation did. Now health care reform is about protecting corporations and profit opposed to protecting individual’s Life and Liberty! Under the color of law a tax mandate with penalty on life is now assessed because government charged with protecting rights, the agent of change is manipulated by the corporate shell/monied interests/corporate aristocrats/ in the lust for profit and power. This is about corporate enslavement of Americans and Jefferson is being proven correct as the financial corporations and the banks in collusion work to control government and protect status quo interests which exact a tremendous price from the governed and the republic!
its a premptive bailout. The insurance companies are in a simillar plight to the banks, mortagage isuers and the building industry in the late 90’s. They are losing customers as people lose their higher paying jobs and take ever lower paying jobs. THAT more than anything else was the original and most powerful motive for mass issuing of “sub prime” mortgages. you better belive it wasnt out of a sincere desire to “help” low income workers. That industry was looking at not only 0 growth but negative growth into the forseablke future.They still are. nothings changes, except now even MORE people are broke. this is the start of the new serfdom. the treasury appropriates payroll taxes and hands them out to capitalist.Its the insurance industry today, whos next? banks and credit card companies as someone else suggested?
what could possibly be the point in voting for a party that tries to enact this kind of corruption?
the Democratic Party is forcing your hand – either you stand for values like social justice, the environment, and an end to the costly, deadly and stupid imperial adventurism, or you stand with them, and support the corruption in Washington so ably represented by that bloodsucking mosquito.
(D)’s like to be able to sneer at low-information (R) voters for “voting against their own self-interest.” Well, if the Democratic controlled House, Senate, and White House jam through this boondoggle of a bill then that’s not going to be so viable an attitude anymore, hmmmm?
“Uniquely American,” indeed.
Maybe we can eliminate the IRS. Since the government will require us to pay 13% of our income to the insurance crooks via the health care reform, maybe they’ll soon decide what percentage of our income goes to other favored industries. Companies can just credit our pay directly to the government, and the government can decide how to dole it out.
As the average worker will be facing lower and lower income in the future (as adjusted by inflation) it’s only reasonable for an industry like the health insurers to claim their portion in advance – otherwise they would find that many Americans would simply decide to go without their products.
Meaining greed, fear, corporate abuse, massive corruption, and a healthy dose of wingnuttery thrown in for good measure?
Criminally corrupt politicians are the reason the U.S. is ranked near the bottom of every catagory when ranked next to other modern, industrialized nations. Time for publically funded elections.
The Congress is back in session and doing the dirty work for the Medical Industrial Complex.
mcconnell $3.3M, hatch $2.9M, baucus $2.8M, grassley $2.7M,
lieberman $2.6M, burr $2.4M, ensign $2.4M, cornyn $2.2M, kyl $2.1M,
conrad $2.1M, cantor $1.8M, boehner $1.7M, coburn $1.2M, j wilson 800K
were paid by the Medical Industrial Complex to kill Health Care Reform.
(Source: OpenSecrets.org)
Co-Author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of a Recent Harvard Study on Annual Deaths of America’s Uninsured, says the lack of coverage can be tied to about 45,000 deaths a year in the United States. The only way to affordably cover all Americans is through a Medicare-for-All, Single-Payer System. A Single-Payer System would generate $300-$400 billion in administrative savings annually, enough to cover all of the uninsured, and to plug the gaps in coverage for Americans with only partial coverage. Obviously, Medicare-for-all is anathema to the insurance industry. What politicians are doing is saving insurance industry profits, by sacrificing American lives.
12 Million Americans were denied health care coverage by the Medical Industrial Complex because they had a pre-existing medical condition. 12K Americans are denied insurance coverage everyday by a for-profit Insurance bureaucrat. (Source: WaPo Article 05′ by Harvard Prof. E. Warren)
Medical malpractice lawsuits are a hot topic but, are they? Tort Reform is such a “Red Herring” and is easily disproved. A 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office said medical malpractice makes up only 2 percent of U.S. health spending. Even “significant reductions” would do little to curb health-care expenses, it concluded.
bush(43) economic speech writer david frum, at least, is willing to admit the idea about selling insurance across state lines is a crock:
New Jersey health policies cost more in large part because New Jersey hospitals and doctors charge more. If I buy a cheaper Kentucky policy that reimburses my providers at Kentucky rates, leaving me to pay the balance, how much good does that do me? And if the Kentucky policy is made to pay New Jersey rates, there vanishes my low Kentucky price.
These are some of the easily refuted arguments bought and paid for by the Medical Industrial Complex to derail any chance of their criminally massive profits being reduced.
Follow the Money: Link
Call Congress and demand, Single-Payer Health Care for All!
(Toll Free # House and Senate)
1-866-338-1015 _____ 1-866-220-0044
1-800-473-6711 _____ 1-866-311-3405
Sign Single-Payer Petition: Link
Don’t let the Medical Industrial Complex steal your Health Care from you and your family by donating huge sums of money to Crooked Politicians in order to maintain the Status Quo. Keep up the good fight.
SEMPER FI!