Recently- McCain said he wanted to tax health care, and then give a 5000 dollar exemption for health care costs as a tax deduction:

http://www.startribune.com/politics/nation...t/18358679.html

The problem is- he offers a 5k dollar tax credit - and health insurance for the average family is usually more than 12k dollars per year.

Still not addressed at all- the 40 million people without health care at all.

Questions-

1) Do you think McCain's plan a sound one, and do you support it and why?

2) Do you think this will be a major campaign issue for him?

3) do you currently have health insurance and how will this affect you?

Just a quick preliminary response.

I can't say that I support the plan because there is insufficient information about the plan, IMO. Just as an FYI, your $12K per year isn't the average family premium; that is the employer's cost. The average family's out of pocket expense is only $3,300. The $5k McCain is offering would more than make up for those costs, wouldn't it? Unless you have other research to provide that supports your claims that you forgot to provide in your opening post, I have to say your claims are unfounded.

My family does have health insurance, and if we were able to use that expense as a deduction, than that would affect me positively, wouldn't it?

Sorry- he intends on getting rid of the tax break for the companies providing health care- which, of course, would lead a company to drop care altogether- wouldn't you?

so, considering that it costs at least 12k per year for a family of four on average for health insurance, 5k deduction wouldn't cover it- not even close.

Do you think when employers drop health care that they are going to up your salary by the amount they "saved" by dropping your care?

Do you plan on a 12k dollar raise to pay for your health care?

This isn't all that clear cut scubatim. There are two types of tax credits - non-refundable and refundable.

The non-refundable credit comes off Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), which means it's only worth the face value, times the persons marginal bracket. A $5000 non-refundable credit, would be worth only $750 at the 15% bracket and $1250 at the 25% bracket. If standard and/or itemized deductions plus personal and dependent exemptions zero someone's AGI, then the non-refundable credit would be worth nothing.

If McCain is talking about a refundable credit, which is taken off the total tax owed, and like Earned Income Credit (EIC), considered a payment, then that's more valuable.

Without knowing which type credit McCain is talking about, we don't know how much it would be worth.

Refundable and Non-refundable Tax Credits

I'm not sure if McCain's plan is fiscally sound, but when has that ever mattered? All he needs is A Plan, because very few voters are going to get into the fine print on any of these plans.

I certainly don't support it. The whole notion of tax credits paying for things at all income levels shows just how out of touch politicians are from anyone who isn't rich. If the government is going to pay for health care (which I am in favor of), why take the crooked path of a tax credit? Why not just pay for insurance directly? Or, better yet, insure your citizens directly?

Do I think this will be a major campaign issue for him? In a way. Health care will certainly come up, so he will have to have A Plan in place to talk about. But all he has to do is make his base happy - Republican voters aren't going to care about insuring the uninsured, but they love the sound of any "tax credit" that applies to them, even if they don't really understand all of the implications. And as I said before, very few voters are going to get into the details, so any plan is almost as good as a good plan.

I currently have health insurance. Great health insurance, through my wife's job at a major research hospital. But that job is in jeopardy, so we are looking at buying health insurance for our family of four a la carte, and that is a horrible prospect. We make a fair amount of money, but not enough to easily absorb $1000/month or so (not to mention the killer deductibles and copays that come with most insurance). If anything happened, it could easily end up costing us our house.

Would that tax credit help us? I suppose it would be better than nothing, but it wouldn't really change the final equation - if we are forced to buy coverage that, say, only covers 80% of the bills, then the $5000-$10,000 bill from anything major would pretty much wipe us out. The current housing market only adds to the problem - since we built 4 years ago, values have gone down to the point where we could not survive the loss if we had to sell.

Unless something happens to change the cost of medical care in this country, any health insurance plan that does not cover 100% of the bills is essentially useless to any family that is not sitting on a large pile of extra cash. Once that big copay comes due, many families would be pushed over the financial edge - and not just the paycheck-to-paycheck families, either. I'm in there, too.

I'm sorry, when did tax credits become the spawn of Satan?

Obviously Obama must be out of touch from anyone who isn't rich. A pivotal part of his minimum wage plan relies on increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit.

I thought the big selling point of a government instituted program was the expansion of coverage. While McCain's plan makes health care more affordable, it doesn't really address things like denial of coverage.

Part of the reason health insurance is so costly is because the industry is practically monopolized.
If McCain's plan really fosters a competitive spirit in the industry, and enhancing individual choice via a tax credit is a big step in that direction, then we would likely see reduced costs.

This is definitely a pick your poison situation.

It may mean you have to pay more but companies imo will not just dump health care coverage.

The devil is always in the details and at this point we have not enough info to judge the “plans” of any candidates. I do favor the market based approach of Republicans over any Dem plan that has the “government” providing health care or detailing coverage. The gov. role for me would be to insure no plan could refuse to cover pre-existing conditions or be cancelled during job change. Many states do this now.

Also it would be nice if the gov. actually reported on the quality of care at every hospital and for every doctor in the country.

Ted

Without the tax credit for companies that offer health insurance- will they be able to afford health insurance?

Lets say you are a "smallish" company with excellent benefits package- it costs about 1200 dollars a month, per employee, and everyone has "family" coverage, with no "low option" plan- and you have around 7000 employees- not a huge company, not a small business either.

That comes to over 8 hundred thousand dollars a month.

Remove that tax break- can the company still afford it? Now, I don't doubt that the company will drop the health care insurance, and probably give everyone a bit of a raise- shifting it over to payroll, so the employee can pay the payroll taxes.

Do you think think it is going to be a 1200 dollar month raise though?

And since the deduction will be only 5k per year- it won't even come close to covering your medical insurance.

Before any change that throws 40-100 million more people OFF of health insurance, the "monopolies" need to be addressed first

we need to bust up Jacho and the AMA, stop allowing frivolous patent renewalls or drugs, with criminal penalties for violations that have mandotory minimums, and start getting murder convictions of insurance executives when people die from denial of care.

Until those things happen, costs won't come down, no matter how much you screw with health plans currently offered.

For instance Ted, Drs are expensive- because they artificially keep thier numbers low, acting against market forces of supply and demand.

We would have to end the pharmacy system we have now, complete overhaul. Drug prices are artificially high in the country, by a factor of 10, at least, due to big pharma.

Companies should drop health insurance. Why is it on companies to provide health care for the country? (Does any other country do it that way? *New thread idea*)

Whatever happens, the health care burden/responsibility seems to be shifting to the government. Tax breaks, tax credits, tax incentives - call it what you will, but it is simply the government redistributing tax money to health care. I'm all for that, in a general sense - the present system is full of problems: lack of coverage, high cost, and inequalities. Free up businesses from that expense (not that I believe it will end up as employee raises anytime soon). Raise income taxes a little, and redistribute the money to cover everyone, even if you have to go a little basic on the coverage. Then, let those who are able to pay for better insurance buy it.

My biggest fear about McCain's plan? The usual Republican "redistribution" of tax money means that businesses will get a windfall at our expense. If this was Bush's plan, we could all run out and buy stock in insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, and hope that our stock profits would defray the extra expense of the health insurance premiums and prescriptions (they wouldn't). And until I see some evidence that things would be significantly different with McCain at the helm, I'm going to assume his plan has been formulated by the same policy geniuses - with the help of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, of course - in the same dark, underground recesses of the GOP Secret Bunker.

I don't really care where it comes from John, but I need health care, and even being fairly reasonably paid and living a middle class lifestyle at this time, no health care would break me.

McCain's purpose is to force companies to drop health care insurance for thier employees and force 100 million plus people to go out shopping for it.

Ya think that will work for most US citizens?

As long as all companies feel the pain equally (they all lose the same) they will just raise prices and then (as always) we all pay.



Ya and most of all we need to stop the damn lawyers and the big law suites we all pay for.



Sounds good and this is what McCain will do although he will involve the states more and the Fed less. Obama will give us a big Federal system that will cost too much and do less.

Hey, I'm not hot on McCain's plan, but asking companies to foot the bill for health insurance while trying to stay competitive is a flawed approach. It worked back in the 50's and 60's, when the rest of the world was buying American toasters, but these days, things aren't so fat.

I've said before, many times, that health care should be one of the first responsibilities of the government, right there behind national defense and building roads. And everyone should be covered, of course, so I don't like any approach that revolves around tax credits, and I'm not crazy about the prospect of things being filtered through private health insurers, at least as we know them today.

The price of medical care today is the worrisome thing, right? I think that universal coverage, and the necessary regulation that comes with it, should bring prices down to something more realistic than what we all see on the bills. Prices are greatly inflated to make up for indigent care, and you know insurance companies only pay a fraction of those a la carte prices. Take indigent care out of the equation with universal coverage, fix the malpractice insurance problem, and simplify the administration and overhead - again, with universal coverage - and I think things become far more efficient.

But the flavor of the quadrennium seems to be the government facilitating the individual's purchase of private health insurance. I'd rather see the government itself act as the insurer, but I still think that this type of plan makes more sense than employers footing the bill for the fortunate while the government tries to fill in the gaps. I hope it all goes smoothly, and I hope that you and I don't have any lapses in coverage, but sooner or later, that change is going to come.

You do realize that all those "law suites" (expensive property rates for lawyers offices are causing high medical costs? ) - cause less than 1% medical costs in the US, right>

Law suits are not even close to causing a problem in the high cost of health care- I thought an informed guy like you would know that already?

Don't tell me you didn't know that and need links, or something to that effect - I am sure you already know that- right?


Weeelllll- just in case you didn't know this already- and put that there by mistake:

(if you are too upset about the slate showing the truth and stuff- you can follow the links to the various studies. - I will post one or two links to original journal publications)

http://www.slate.com/id/2145400/

The most impressive and comprehensive study is by the Harvard Medical Practice released in 1990. The Harvard researchers took a huge sample of 31,000 medical records, dating from the mid-1980s, and had them evaluated by practicing doctors and nurses, the professionals most likely to be sympathetic to the demands of the doctor's office and operating room. The records went through multiple rounds of evaluation, and a finding of negligence was made only if two doctors, working independently, separately reached that conclusion. Even with this conservative methodology, the study found that doctors were injuring one out of every 25 patients—and that only 4 percent of these injured patients sued.

The Harvard study stands for a large body of literature. On their own, however, the results don't disprove the Republicans' thesis that many medical malpractice suits are frivolous. Maybe badly injured patients don't sue, while the reflexively litigious clog up the legal system, making tort reform a viable solution. But a new study, released in May, demolishes that possibility. Dr. David Studdert led a team of eight researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation* who examined 1,452 medical malpractice lawsuits. They found that more than 90 percent of the claims showed evidence of medical injury, which means they weren't frivolous. In 60 percent of these cases, the injury resulted from physician wrongdoing. In a quarter of the claims, the patient died.

When baseless medical malpractice suits were brought, the study further found, the courts efficiently threw them out. Only six of the cases in which the researchers couldn't detect injury received even token compensation. Of those in which an injury resulted from treatment, but evidence of error was uncertain, 145 out of 515 received compensation. Indeed, a bigger problem was that 236* cases were thrown out of court despite evidence of injury and error to patients by physicians. The other approximately 1,050 cases, in the research team's opinion, were decided correctly, with damage awards going to the injured and dismissal foiling the frivolous suits.*


(here is an entire book based on your very myth)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226036480/

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In January 2005, President Bush declared the medical malpractice liability system "out of control." The president's speech was merely an echo of what doctors and politicians (mostly Republicans) have been saying for years—that medical malpractice premiums are skyrocketing due to an explosion in malpractice litigation. Along comes Baker, director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law, to puncture "the medical malpractice myth" with a talent for reasoned argument and incisiveness. He counters that the real problem is "too much medical malpractice, not too much litigation," and that the cost of malpractice is lost lives and the "pain and suffering of tens of thousands of people every year"—most of whom do not sue. Baker argues that the rise in medical premiums has more to do with economic cycles and the competitive nature of the insurance industry than runaway juries. Finally, Baker offers an alternative in the form of evidence-based medical liability reform that seeks to decrease the incidence of malpractice and also protect doctors from rising premium costs. Having worked with insurance companies, law firms and doctors, Baker brings experience and perspective to his book, which is sure to be important and controversial in future debates. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/21/2205

Malpractice suits often result when an unexpected adverse outcome is met with a lack of empathy from physicians and a perceived or actual withholding of essential information.4 Stemming the causes of medical errors requires disclosure and analysis, which create tension in the current liability climate.

The current tort system does not promote open communication to improve patient safety. On the contrary, it jeopardizes patient safety by creating an intimidating liability environment. Studies consistently show that health care providers are understandably reticent about discussing errors, because they believe that they have no appropriate assurance of legal protection.5 This reticence, in turn, impedes systemic and programmatic efforts to prevent medical errors.



Bottom line is- malpractice lawsuits and judgements against doctors and hospital do NOTHING in big enough numbers to make health care unaffordable,

Heck, if I had to just pay out of pocket what the "lawsuits" cost as part of my premium?

Let's see- 1% of 1200 dollars a month? Lets see, that is what, 12 bucks a month- ya, I will trade that out of pocket expense for what I pay now. OR, lets get all "liberal" with the numbers on how much lawsuits cost- how about, oh, 10% of all my monthly health care insurance premiums were liability protection, gee, now I am up to 120 bucks a month Ted

That is still quite a bit less than my out of pocket portion of my premium now.

The question is was the award consistent with the injury loss or was it excessive – driven by lawyers who care only about the big payoff?

The medical industry - esp. hospitals need more government oversight imo.

As an aside can you tell me what the Obama “universal plan” would do for coverage of Americans? The numbers used for ‘uninsured” imply that he includes illegal aliens in the number. Which implies he will “cover them” at the expense of us all.