Congressional Democrats seem extremely pleased with themselves over how they fiddled with the design of an excise tax on employer-provided insurance that will not kick in for eight years (and then grow faster after another two years) to make it look like it will bring in a huge amount of money in the years 2020 through 2029. Given the incredibly stupid design of the excise tax to begin with, no one who understands politics should doubt for a second that this tax will ever go into effect as planned, or bring in this huge amount of revenue.

The Change to Win labor federation has unsurprisingly backed the health care bill, even with the increased excise tax on middle class health care plans. Later, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee also decided to endorse the bill.

This is frankly rather amazing in that totally-saw-it-coming way. We’ve been waiting for days to see the CBO score to see how much the final health care bill will cost, with the goals being to both reduce the deficit and to fit under the arbitrary $900 billion cap posed by Obama.

It seems they’ve been unable to do so, as Ben Smith now reports that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is on his way to the White House to discuss plans by Democrats to actually raise the tax on middle class health care plans in order to pay for the bill.

While defending the cost-cuting measures in the health reform bill, Budget Director Orszag and Health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle slip in one whopper with cheese when describing the excise tax escalation rates.

Defenders of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber are still falsely claiming I accused him of tainting his analysis for pay, suggesting that I’m ignoring Gruber’s qualification for the HHS contract, while able commentators demand apologies for these claims. I don’t want apologies; what I want is independent analysis.

The White House negotiated this excise tax deal directly with labor; Jim Messina was the lead negotiator on the White House side. The House and Senate were working on their own issues and not necessarily involved in this. Richard Trumka said on the call that he had been assured that the House and Senate signed off on the changes. However, Live Pulse talked to Joe Courtney, who was singled out by labor as their lead man on the subject, and it doesn’t exactly sound like he’s on board.

In a conference call, leaders of America’s top unions announced their deal on the excise tax, one of the biggest flashpoints in the negotiations over a final health care bill. House and Senate leaders as well as the White House are on board with the new plan, which raises the threshold for which plans get captured, allows for a transition period for collectively bargained as well as state and local employee plans, and most interestingly, basically opens the exchanges to all employers after 2018.

With three more days to go, an ultimate agreement seems a tall order. But the President is fully engaged in these final negotiations, and whatever comes out will bear his stamp.

If unions take this deal, it’s a sell-out of epic proportions. I’m hard pressed to think of a deal unions could cut in health care that would cause more long-term damage to not just the credibility of the labor movement, but the middle class.

The so called “Cadillac” tax is, in reality, a teacher tax. It taxes plans based on their cost, but not their generosity. As anyone who has bought health insurance will tell you, the biggest factor in determining the cost of insurance is not how generous the coverage is, but the sex, age, and health status of the buyer. As a result professions that tend to employer older, less healthy females–like teaching–will bare the brunt of this excise tax, regardless of how generous or bare bones the policies.