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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.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is headed into a meeting with President Obama this afternoon after the White House and Congressional leaders have begun to discuss a higher-than-expected excise tax on some health care plans, in order to maintain their claim that health care legislation will reduce the deficit, a source involved in health care talks said.
Any unexpected change to the health care plan could endanger support for the bill from labor, which agreed to back it after reductions to the planned excise tax. Proposed new changes, I’m told, concern cuts to the rate at which increases to the tax exemption cap are indexed.
They already stole at least $10 billion in the student loan reform bill from community colleges to pay for this PhRMA bailout. Jon Walker notes that adding a public option would save at least $25 billion in the bill. The House paid for its bill by taxing the richest Americans.
And yet, faced will trying to contain the costs of this bill, Democrats’ first instinct is to raise taxes on the middle class even further. Brilliant!
Frankly, this is what unions get for accepting the excise tax in the first place. They agreed to the health care tax – a Reagan idea – and so of course they should expect it to be raised. I just don’t think they thought it’d be raised before they even pass the bill.
UPDATE: Sam Stein has some additional details on what kind of changes we’re looking at:
Under the president’s plan, those families with health care plans over $27,500 and individuals with plans over $10,200 would be taxed starting in 2018. That tax would be indexed to the Consumer Price Index plus one percent, which would provide some additional comfort to those with high-end policies — specifically for labor workers who had bargained for these plans.
The plan, however, got tripped up after congressional negotiators received poorer-than-expected feedback from the Congressional Budget Office, a senior Democratic hill aide confirmed. And as a compromise, on Wednesday, they began discussing indexing the tax simply to the Consumer Price Index.
“What the White House is putting out is not any big major changes to the deal,” said a source briefed on the matter. “What they are talking about is the way things are right now the tax was indexed to CPI+1 and they want to change it to CPI general inflation.”
Trumka is still at the White House, and according to Sam Stein, will meet with the AFL-CIO Executive Committee tomorrow to discuss the changes.
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About Work in Progress
Democrats have become too corrupted or too stupid to keep power.
Pass this into law and they are done.
This policy is built on quicksand.
Speechless, I’m simply left speechless. The audacity it would take to use a middle class tax increase, however selective, to pay for the cost savings not gained because public alternative plans were jettisoned from the legislation, is simply incredible. Staggering.
Are the Democrats trying to alienate everyone on Earth? I mean, Christ, they’re already planning to rob college students to avoid raising taxes on rich people or threatening rich people’s profits with competition on drug prices or public payer health plans. Now they’re going to … tax middle class health plans, in order to provide cost savings on middle class health plans?
I mean SHIT. How “let them eat cake” can the Democratic Party officials get? How fucking Marie Antoinette can they get?!
LMAO. Hubris is such a good spectator sport.
Having focused on Kucinich as the enemy, they now find the real enemy is themselves.
And this is taking from the young (the future) to pay for the old (the past).
What are ya gonna do, vote for the third parties they’ve fought like hell to keep off the ballot?
I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to make this palatable to the unions. It’s those of us who aren’t in unions and have good health insurance who need to worry.
I’ll vote No Party if that is all that there is besides D’s and R’s. I have had it. Seymour to Democrats: “OVER AND OUT!”
Unreal.
Anyone that doesn’t realize these Democrats are actually Republicans just isn’t paying attention.
Unreal. The Democrats are the Republicans, and the REpublicans are bat shit fucking crazy.
No voice for the middle or left of middle.
The one joy I get is that they’re doing all in the power to make sure they lose this November. They damn sure deserve it.
I really find this hard to believe. If the Democrats propose raising taxes at the last minute and try to push it through I think Pelosi’s gavel could be in jeopardy. Remember: she’s lost Murtha and Rangel as key supporters and the vulnerable House Dems could always cross work with Republicans to challenge the chairmen of their committees.
You have got love Barack Obama and these Moronic Dems.
Now in the middle of the 21st century great depression the PHONY Dems are going to pass a Health Care Bill that raises taxes.
News to UNION you probably don’t want to dance with the current band of crooks called Dems.
This bill is going to give hard core progressives the opportunity to wipe out some of these phony dems.
Chris Matthews what a joke, he is telling Dems to vote for a health care bill that 54% of the nation hates.
Well, the Democrats amazed me again. I was sure that premium subsidies would be what would come under fire almost immediately from deficit hawks, but this is truly incredible. There’s almost no middle class left, and the Democrats are doing their best to kill the remaining members of an endangered species.
Offer Medicaid to all! Let’s go!!! Every single dem would get re-elected when the stupid people of this country finally figure out they’d pay less for health insurance!
Yes re: quicksand, especially considering it’s debatable the excise tax will even work.
But you know. Can’t tax the rich
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if they remove the non-union exemption and keep the union exemption.
1
Well, wouldn’t want to hurt the economy…teehee.
Of course that’s what they’ll do.
I really hope not tho. The unions deserve to get screwed for selling out the rest of the middle class.
Trumka is just another PINO, he should be completely shamed as a leader.
The excise tax was already an egregious offense … but to try to RAISE it now? You don’t meet cost savings requirements on health care plans by:
1) Refusing to further tax rich people in general in a country where the rich currently avoid facing the same tax picture they would face anywhere else in the Western World by a huge margin.
2) Refusing to save costs on drugs via obvious and logical allowances for generics competition and limits on patent monopolies in your legislation because this threatens pharmaceutical corporation profits,
3) Refusing to create famously more efficient and cheaper public plan competition for private insurers in your legislation because this threatens health insurance corporation profits,
4) Attacking funds for low-income college students and raising a tax on anyone middle class who has a nicer middle class insurance plan.
This legislation is a public policy disaster!
Kucinich: “D’oh!”
How do you think France and Japan and other countries around the world have built their superior health systems?
WITH MONEY FROM BROAD-BASED TAXES ON THE MIDDLE CLASS!!!!!!
The tax exemption for health care benefits is actually the most regressive tax break in the entire tax code. It disproportionately benefits upper middle class people.
People who don’t have comfortable jobs with the government or large corporations often have to pay for 100% of their health care with after-tax dollars. How in the hell is that fair? All the “cadillac tax” does is ask people with good, tax-free health benefits to pay taxes on a small percentage of their health care benefit.
Progressives who are fighting a modest tax on health benefits are delusional. We aren’t going to have a more just society without people with good jobs sharing some of the cost. Hurray for unions getting people good jobs! That doesn’t mean they get to keep an unjust tax break forever.
I’m with you. It’s totally time to break the monopoly of hands on the levers of power. Problem is, “that’s SOCIALISM!”
Is there enough society left to socialize?
Problem is the middle class is disappearing.
Just wait for there to be some major distraction once it is time for the bill to supposedly made good…like for instance Iran might be the excuse to drop healthcare reform before the reform can be made to actually improve things instead of reforming things to make it worse.
Apparently they’ll do ANYTHING for this bill. gotta kinda wonder why?
I thought the taxes were gonna BE on the wealthy plan and only 2.0% at that.
I guess what’s making this so expensivo is the gubmint subsidies?
Besides, there’s barely a middle class left….has anyone TOLD these clowns?
Great minds and all
Oh, they can and will get far worse. Obama is nutz. He seems to have aimed all his ammo at the Middle class, not the poor and not the rich. He appears to hate whats left of the middle and his policies are showing it. Too bad for the Dems. the Middle class votes. These are a class of either political suicides who have already got their Corp. jobs picked out and don’t give a shit or they’re fucking idiots,
or all of the above.
How about you pay for health care by taxing, you know, the wealthy? What’s regressive is taxing the BENEFITS of middle class Americans when this is an extremely rich country. Taxing benefits to pay for subsidies to private insurance companies isn’t taxing incomes to pay for a collective government-run health finance system.
Huck, your argument misses the point: Japan and France may tax the middle class, but the government takes that money and plows it back into guaranteed health care benefits for its people. The government itself spends x% of GDP on health care *services.*
If that were the deal, I’d take it, even though it would be bad for me financially. I’d love that type of guaranteed health *care.*
What the Democrats are proposing is to tax some people’s health care insurance with the expectation that the tax will cause employers/insurers to REDUCE health care benefits and/or drop coverage altogether. It’s expected part of that will be passed onto increased salaries which will be subject to income taxes.
Nothing about this process guarantees people health care *services* or benefits. This tax guarantees just the opposite, in fact. Nothing about it is guaranteed to be a “progressive” tax. All that’s really guaranteed is the employer-based health care system will unravel faster than it would have otherwise and some people will get tax credits to buy private insurance of minimal quality. The poorest might be better off, but most of the rest would certainly be worse off.
And private insurers make out like bandits. Progressive? Please!
You’re comparing apples and oranges. Basic healthcare in other countries is highly regulated and not profit-based.
Fucking cowards. When you consider the income disparities in this country, it’s absurd that we’re even paying taxes.
“There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” – Warren Buffett
This problem could be solved probably by raising taxes on the top 1% by a tenth of a percentage. But we’re easy to victimize because we can’t fight back.
No money, no votes. It is all very simple. Let them lose in November and 2012.
This is what I found earlier today. If anybody knows these “people” do ( they are “people” now right?)
Five Questions About President Obama’s Proposed Changes To The Medicare Payroll Tax
…………..
3. Who would be affected?
Taken together, both the earned- and investment-income portions of the tax would hit the top 2.6 percent of U.S. households, according to The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. That would allow Obama to keep his campaign promise not to raise taxes for 95 percent of the country’s households.
The tax on investment income would not apply to some non-wage income from certain small businesses. Under current law, employees of S corporations, a type of company with a limited number of shareholders, are able to receive some of their income as distributions – a share of the companies’ profits – rather than as wages.
Lobbying by business groups helped ensure that S corporations’ employees who are also shareholders wouldn’t face the new tax on their share of the profits. However, people who invest in S corporations, but do not participate in the operation of the business, would have to pay the new Medicare tax on any dividends or other unearned income they receive from the business.
……………….
Now THIS has changed? I’m confused.
It’s not just from the middle class, it’s from every citizen.
Health Care is about 17% of the economy.
Health Insurance Companies Take 30% of every health care dollar.
There are about 100,000,000 million workers in the US.
Medicare for all = 17%x30%x100,000,000 = (approx) 5,000,000 more unemployed.
That’s by design.
As FDR himself said, nothing in politics happens by accident. If something happens, you can be damn sure it was planned that way.
France and Japan and virtually the entire civilized world tax their rich at multiples of the tax rate the rich pay in the U.S. Those other nations also have public health systems, unlike the U.S. for those who are under age 65, not in the military, or poor.
The U.S. middle class pays higher tax rates than the rich, and this would make it even higher.
Taxing the middle class more to further enrich Pharma and the Insurance is not only unfair, it is stupid politically.
But money taken out of the economy from one unproductive sector is made available for use by other sectors of the economy! In other words, health care inefficiency is like a tax on the American economy. Money made available for overpriced medicine can’t be put to work creating jobs in other industries. You know, industries that might produce things directly: technology, basic materials, energy, etc.
The private health insurance industry may create 5 million more jobs than public health care would (I severely doubt that, BTW), but whatever jobs were lost by improving the efficiency of the system would be made up for in other economic activity.
How is paying more in taxes to GIVE AWAY TO FOR PROFIT COMPANIES fair? I would cheerfully pay more in taxes for a single payer system but what has apparently escaped your attention is that this bill is about as far from single payer is possible to be. This is a tax increase solely for the purpose of throwing it at for profit insurance companies.
We agree. However the investors, the rich, would have to focus their efforts on investing in industry, not hedge funds. Industry pays 7% to 15%. Hedge funds promise 40% (Until the bubble bursts).
Your right it’s not just..so? Is not making the Health care companies face REAL competition fair? NO! It’s BS but it’s being sold to us as the only deal we can get because the Dems. are corrupt. It’s pathetic. They think they can get way with selling out the people who put them in office by doing this open sell out to the Health Ins. companies. We’ll see but I think they’re fucking this up royally. Worse , add this to them totally dropping the ball on jobs while doing this circle jerk. This isn’t what they were given a mandate to do. If I were a GOper right now I’d be smiling BIG time. All they have to do is just sit back and watch the Dems. do themselves in.
The problem is that this is based on price rather than the service paid for. Someone for instance can have an expensive plan because they are a senior with a medical condition. Also look at what has been done in California with the 40% price increase by Wellpoint without an increase in services. Having insurance companies turn people’s health insurance plans into “Cadillac plans” by raising their prices in the double digits each year is both bad politics for those in Congress who support this as well as bad policy. This means more and more people will be taxed for having Cadillac plans simply because of the rising price of health insurance rather than from them upgrading their plans. Mandating that people buy from insurance companies and then letting the insurance companies decide what taxes you pay (for the money to be funneled back to them no less) is insanity. The insurance companies get you coming and going – if you go uninsured rather than pay 40% more plus the excise tax now that your plan is labeled a Cadillac plan because of the higher rates, you still have to pay the insurance companies anyway with the 2% tax on your income that goes to them. You get insurance priced out of affordability so the insurance companies are rewarded by the IRS shaking you down for 2% of your income that goes to them but you don’t get coverage.
You’re right. It is easy money. Hopefully most Americans realize that health care insurers are NOT in the business of health care. They’re in the business of financial services. Really, there’s no difference between what they do and what Goldman Sachs (a giant hedge fund disguised as an investment bank) does, except they gamble with people’s lives in a more direct fashion.
Like the rest of the financial services sector, the insurers just take their money off the top. They contribute nothing actually productive to the economy.
Actually, what will happen is that companies and people will figure out ways to avoid the tax. The revenue will not be what is projected. The cost will be more than projected.
At that point, you will have the usual way things are. NONE of these projections every turns out to be true.
Wow, what a surprise.
“Frankly, this is what unions get for accepting the excise tax in the first place.”
Yup, fuck em. Nice job Trumka.
The investment banks as well. They’re using their money to speculate on paper, leaving no money to lend to those who want to build something. In “One World, Ready or Not” Greider writes about how money travels globally, from bank to bank and from corporation to corporation, never put into actual use in the economy. The book was written in 87 so the exotic instruments aren’t part of the discussion but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to add them to the equation.
Neither France, nor Japan, nor the rest of entire civilized world have a Republic Party determined to fight by any means necessary to protect the rights of the wealthy over all others.
When the Dem’s ignored the town halls, everyone here thought it was cute.
After they learned they could do that with impunity, they began to ignore you also.
As the old story goes, “They came for people on the edge of town, and I did not say anything. Then, they came for my neighbor, and I didn’t say anything. Then, they came for me….”
Paraphrased, but you get the jist.
Oh that will play real well the the public; Repub’s will jump on that so fast it will be blinding.
Kucinich should fucking turn around and tell Obama that that changes everything.
This is Obama and he needs to be refuted, sent packing into the arms of Rham.
We agree: companies will avoid the tax by reducing health care benefits and dropping coverage where possible. Insurers will design less-costly plans with reduced benefits (since they can’t sell plans subject to special 40% taxes to very many customers).
The revenues WILL be less than projected, because the models insanely assume that employers will transfer much of the money saved by reduced benefits into higher salaries. It won’t happen, especially not with the U.S. suffering “elevated unemployment for an extended period of time.” There’s simply too much slack in the labor market to absorb those kinds of salary increases.
The costs will balloon beyond what’s projected here, as many more people than expected will avail themselves of tax credits and Medicaid. The states will clamor for more federal help on Medicaid, and they’ll probably get it while the money lasts.
It’s a fiscal nightmare.
Amazed to find myself cheering for Stupack and Mitch McConnell.
Recall, this is the work of Gruber/The White House, and the point of it was to get companies to work coverage/services downward.
This is how you engineer another Democratic electoral wipeout, like in 1994.
Go after the middle class.
hasten the collapse
c’mon, revolution
so the Dem leadership and rank and file wants to lay a new higher new tax on our HC bennies, adding to the middle class crush, the pre-ex elimination does NOT begin for adults (you know the ones with all the pre-ex conditions, lol)for YEARS, UE will stay at 10% all year long, and Obama and Pelosi are looking down their noses at we blue collar folks who have carried the party for my lifetime, all to bail out AHIP and PHARMA
yeah frak this, electoral wipeout for a generation IMO
and I fell off the DNC turnip truck after our primaries….
They and the rich are the only ones with any money. Govt isn’t going to tax the rich so they’ll tax the shit out of the rest of us. My withholding went up $2 a week on 1 Jan. Not a lot of dust and isn’t going to put me on the street. Multiply it by just the number of people in the country who take home a paycheck equal to mine. 52 times a year.
Oh my…. that old talking point. Are you aware that the federal government already pays a bigger portion of medical bills than private insurers? Single payer means one payer not a “government takeover” of health care.
Ryan Grim had a great tweet.
That’s Rich Trumka, not The Rich, unfortuately.
They sure seem determined to piss off as many people as possible, don’t they? As it stands now, they might get votes from the 500 or so regular Daily Kos readers and nobody else.
Andy Stern is a fucking thug, and now Trumka will fly his middle finger at his members and tell them to salute, bend over and pucker up.
What little respect I had for Stern went out the window with his escapades in CA and Puerto Rico.
The problem with health care in this country isn’t the corporate profits, the waste & bureaucracy in the for-profit sector, or the inability to buy medicine at reasonable prices. No, the problem is that health care is too cheap for the middle class! So we need a punitive 40% excise tax to force people into policies with high deductibles & co-pays.
Brilliant! But if the whole idea behind this punitive tax is to force people off of good-quality insurance plans, it seems it’s not going to take in a lot of revenue. More hand-waving!
No, the problem is that health care is too cheap for the middle class!
How the hell do you figure that? Or are you here just to be a douche and see how many people you can piss off?
Fucking cowards. When you consider the income disparities in this country, it’s absurd that we’re even paying taxes. Exactly. I absolutely hate when I hear pols say but how can we pay for this or that, or we can’t afford this or that, and sadly too many Americans actually believe that. This is a wealthy country, just very few of us actually are enjoying that wealth. What we need is some sort of asset tax.
That was snark, Margaret!
: )
Put your snark hat on Peg! Sixth Estate is making the same point I did…
Then I apologize. Today hasn’t been my day. perhaps I should withdraw from the conversation before I make a total fool of myself. Again, sorry.
Endless wars aren’t helping either.
Happens to me all the time…
It has been a totally bad day, that’s for sure. I’m being rare on the comments side myself.
I updated the post with additional details from Sam Stein’s reporting.
Agreed. Though, keep in mind, these awful endless wars have lined the pockets of a lot of this country’s wealthy.
No puckering around here….not even a little smooch
No, they are just trying to please who they consider to be their real constituents (a handful of people) while they could care less about the hundreds of millions of the rest of us.
My union runs a non-profit health care plan for it’s members. The union has explained that it has only two options available to keep plan costs below the threshold that will trigger the 40% excise tax: either lower the level of health care services offered, or increase the co-pays and out-of-pocket costs to members.
President Obama apparently believes that forcing health care providers to offer less care for more money to the working class is an acceptable way to bend the rising “cost curve” of health care downward.
Does that sound like something the candidate of “hope and change” would do?
Or does it just sound cynical and cruel?
War i$ good bu$ine$$.
Not only does $0.48 out every tax dollar you pay go to the War Dept (War Resisters League – pdf) the War Dept also wants to kill your children.
Maybe I’ll drop back in later. Perhaps a vigorous workout is what I need. See you guys. :-)
You mean the people with money. I know.
Mr Nobel Peace Prize is lining up his own set of bunker buster bombs…
It’s getting very difficult to make any sense at all of how our country is constructed. It’s insane.
Obama is bringing lots of hope and change to the corporate execs. It’s not that Obama isn’t delivering, it’s just a matter of who Obama is delivering to.
At least after tomorrow, I can join flat et al on the porch again.
Markets. If countries won’t open their markets to our Made in China products we, as occupiers, can open them. One of the grand schemes when Bremer, remember Bremer, took over as Pro Consul in Baghdad. Privatize everything, open the country to US investors, flood the country with cheap goods. Problem was the Irakis had other ideas. As do the Afghans.
I’m trying like hell to remember where I read the bit about the military killing our children. That was just the last line. Just the other day, too. It’ll come to me.
Yes, that is where it came from; efficiently coordinated with the K street crew.
The circular firing squad: located at East Capitol Street, NE and 1st Street, NE Washington, DC 20002 . Republicans watching from under their desks, throwing ammo to the fools with the 59 vote majority.
And just to see either how many were fooled, or how they were willing participants in a rigged and deceitful amnipulative scheme- read this and follow some links.
From Huffington post:
“NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option” by Miles Mogulescu located at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/ny-times-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html
From Mogulescu:
Liberals and unions bent over from the git-go. Is it any wonder they keep sticking it to us? Only when we are as ruthless as the rest will we be allowed to eat at the grownups political table.
Well that is the dumbest part. Why did Kucinich commit? They may never be able to pass this mess. I’m still not convinced — and neither are they.
They’re going to miss their Friday/Saturday deadline that Van Hollen set out. Even if they get a CBO score tomorrow, that means they can’t vote until Sunday. And they’ve got a meeting at the White House with labor leaders tomorrow, so it ain’t a sealed deal by any means.
He could have played it out til the end. Even if there was only a 10% chance that it doesn’t pass, that’s a 10% chance Dennis gets to be a hero.
I have been calling for more than a year now, for a surtax on excess profits on major corporations, especially beginning with those that pollute and make us sick in the first place, and those that profit ie, the insurers. Hey it is long overdue. Call a reinvestment in the future of the nation. And if we do not have our health, then how do we pursue life, liberty and happiness? This surtax would go into a fund that could only be used for healthcare for all. Veterans benefits and healthcare would come out of a fund created by a surcharge on every defense contract after price is negotiated and before it is paid out. Emergency care for the victims of gun violence would be paid for by a surcharge on every assault weapon and automatic handgun levied at point of manufacture. This would also pay for funeral and burial expenses. It would not cover the perpetrators! Nor would it used to pay for lawsuits. Manufacturers would be on their own! Sure consumers ultimately would pay but just like tobacco those that purchase these guns will do so regardless. These are ideas whose time has come.
I’m with you! I’m effen pissed. They better not mess with Trumka’s deal.
Why the hell can’t they (White House) go to Pharma and renegotiate THEIR part?? Why do they always have to take more and more from the wrong places? Pharma hasn’t had to do anything since THEIR deal was made. Obama/Rahm need to go to Pharma and tell THEM the CBO numbers aren’t effen working and THEY have to ante up now!! What the hell is the matter with these guys? Where is O’s Primary Candidate?? Why hasn’t that person been named yet?
Admiral Gene Larocque, veteran of WWII, Korea and Viet Nam, speaking to Studs Turkel in 1985.
“For about twenty years after the war, I couldn’t look at any film on World War Two. It brought back memories that I didn’t want to keep around. I hated to see how they glorified war. In all those films, people get blown up with their clothes and fall gracefully to the ground. You don’t see anybody being blown apart. You don’t see arms and legs and mutilated bodies. You see only an antiseptic, clean, neat way to die gloriously. I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his live for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.”
From Voices of a People’s History”, pp 373-376
This is so going to bite the democrats in the a** in Nov. I’m still beyond amazed that with all that’s going on, Obama is bending over backwards accomodate conservatives, the rich, and the very business interests he claims are the bad guys.
Kucinich was the classic bow of subject to alpha male. Nothing could be more obvious. Please read King of the Mountain and show up for the book salon (scroll down to 4/11). It’s another one of those scales-falling-from-eyes books.
November is going to be a dark, gray month. Dems are about to light the fuse that will destroy them in the mid-terms.
No worries. It’s been a contentious debate. It can be hard to know when people are joking.
It seems that the entire D party will be seeking reelection on the hope that absolutely none of the liberals will have the ability to remember the past. Perhaps the only reason they have to follow this mistake down now is the hope that continued insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist contributions will be sufficient to allow them to run enough advertisements to erase the past.
Raising the excise tax – forcing employers to spend even less on insurance – won’t generate larger revenues. It will only provide better cover to employers for providing less. CBO scores or not, this is politically stupid and will not even accomplish it’s specified goal of raising revenues from the middle class. The small number of rich that keep their “Cadillac” plans will just get a tax deduction as a part of their compensation package.
When you count on the stupidity of those that you decide to harm under the pretense of helping them you have to hope that you really can fool all the people all the time. They must simply be hoping that by forcing all of the lefties to swear a blood oath, in supporting this thing, that they can only be criticized from the right.
Now that the Unions (via Trumka) have threatened Congressional members who vote against this travesty bill, they are being forced to back ANYTHING the White House tells them to agree to.
Back when I was a lawyer, that was called ‘SANDBAGGING!”
No wonder the Unions suck at negotiating.
One more broken promises: “if you’re a family earning less than 250,000 dollars today, you won’t see your taxes raised by one single dollar if I’m elected” (paraphrasing somewhat because I CBA to dig up the quote, but I remember him saying it, quite clearly).
Oh wait, maybe taxing your health plan doesn’t count as “raising your taxes” in the bizarro-world logic that seems popular these days…
We are Rome. We are doomed. I am a union member laughing at AFL-CIO President Trumka. What a joke Trumka is. Bow to your corporate masters you union fraud. First corruption, then disintegration, then obliteration. Welcome the fall of the American Empire. UUUUUGH!!!
No, only the CEOs might be unemployed, though there would be a new market fo rsupplemental insurance for those wanting caviar in their hospital rooms. Accomodations for actual working people during the transition from private insurance to Single-Payer were provided for with first hire options and retraining and placement programs in at least one of the Single-Payer bills, I believe it was Sanders’. Haven’t read the text of Grayson’s version.
What planet do you inhabit? Or is that question too difficult for you to calculate with your advanced mathematical skillz?
17%*30%*100M = Are you f’ing serious?
If 17% of the US economy were actually health insurance workers we would long ago have been well and truly f*cked.
If that 30% went directly to salaries, these companies would be well and truly f*cked.
If you actually expended a little thought before typing you’d recognize that having 17% of the workforce dedicated to providing *insurance* for health care is nutty and lightyears from the reality of the situation.
Are 1 in 5 of the people you know involved in health care insurance? Use some basic inductive reasoning. Did the parents of your friends all want their kids to grow up to be health plan administrators?
One more time: Health insurance is not the same as health care. So, while Obama forces us to spend money on health insurance, he isn’t actually committing us to spending more on health care. That’s a large part of the argument against his travesty of a “reform” plan.
I’ll let brighter bulbs discuss the multiplier effects of spending on health care vs the employment costs for the health care and the health insurance industries. (Just so we’re certain, you’re not one of those bright bulbs).
Convoluted as all hell.
Lemme know when you simplify that . .
It just don’t spin well . . got linky?
I am getting the feeling this is gonna be so bad come nov. that this gets repealed.
25% or so of the people who would normally back a dem are gonna sit home after what unfolded rite before their eyes over the last year.
I’m making plans to be otherwise engaged. I’m trying to think about what would be truly appropriate though.
For the life of me Margaret, if I didn’t know the elected offals will all get their sinecures post service I’d think they were stupid for that.
But they ain’t, they don’t care their job is to craft legislation to benefit their benefactors, who get them elected then employ them to lobby after their time spent as offals.
I for one place just as much if not more blame on “the One” Obama as I do any democrat, The corruption is equally devided……..I’ll be the first to say “yes I am now ashamed of my vote” One of many votes that helped bring these totally deranged dumb butts to power.
I think too compromised being fed by corporate lobbyists for last three decades is a better answer. eg. Gate crashers at the White House State Dineer inadvertently put the spot-light on the guest list which was full of AHIP & Pharma executives. Do not be naive that were there to get lectured for prior year premium increases.
I am really ashamed that I voted Democratic last time. At the time, I had the illusion of voting for a party which I thought still had at-least a little bit of values propounded by Thomas Jefferson, FDR & LBJ.
Kill this Bill with mandates. It will make our economy un-competative, destroy our social fabric, immoral & un-American.
To keep my conscience clear I am going to vote GREEN party from now on since I know they would not accept a single corporate dime as party charter forbids doing so and so their values will always be aligned to care for the common people.
Richard Trumka = Obama’s poodle
I’ve given up on the concepts of middle and left of middle. We only have self-destructive and insane.