5 posts tagged “health care”
The planet earth scored another major political victory today when Henry Waxman (D-CA) won the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He wrested control from John Dingell (D-General Motors), who has been blocking any meaningful climate change legislation in the House because he thought it would be bad for the Big Three. Of course, we know how well that has worked out for them...
This is great. We know that Obama has said repeatedly that one of his top agenda items is going to be carbon emissions reduction. With Waxman at the head of the key committee in the House, Obama's job just got a heck of a lot easier.
There is no question, Obama is putting all the pieces in place for some major legislative accomplishments. All of the key people he is appointing to his staff are folks with deep understanding of how the legislative process works in Washington. With large majorities in the House and Senate, and some powerful allies on the relevant committees, the chess pieces are set. I feel fairly certain that he's going to get major health care reform and major global warming legislation passed within the first six months of his presidency. And that, my friends, is change we can believe in!
When I say scandal, I'm not talking the normal stuff that gets splashed all over the television "news", like sexual imbroglios and such... I'm talking about the fact that when you and I work, we pay 35% of our income in taxes - while the so-called titans of Wall Street only pay 15% on their hundred million dollar pay packages (if they end up paying anything at all). Unfair you say? Scandalous, I say. Even more so now that you and I will be on the hook with our future tax payments to clean up the mess that those jackasses created.
From Ezra Klein:
Fedwatcher Tim Duy makes some good points:
I have to imagine the employees of Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers are currently thinking that they clearly did not take on enough risk over the past several years. Lehman employees, in particular, were fed into the moral hazard grinder that was operational for a scant two days. How unfortunate. Which leads me to my most significant concern about Fed policy over the past year – the inconsistency. Facilitate the liquidation of Bear Sterns by backstopping $29 billion of questionable assets. Then, recognizing the moral hazard created by that move, let Lehman collapse. Then, recognizing the consequences of vanquishing moral hazard, effectively purchasing AIG. At this point, the endgame should be clear to policymakers – a taxpayer bailout. The bad assets need to be consolidated and eliminated. Congress needs to be working on a mechanism to make this happen, a new RTC. Any Congressional action needs to include a reevaluation of the state of financial regulation...I think we are now all realizing where we are headed. We are moving into the endgame, when Congress socializes the losses after privatizing the gains.
You should read his whole post. But the conclusion illuminates a basic unfairness we should recognize: The resolution to the past decade or so of rocketing wealth in the finance sector will be that all those guys remain jaw-droppingly rich while taxpayers pay off hundreds of billions of their bad bets. Making it all the more galling, the very traders who forced us into this mess will escape not only the bill, but they'll be exempted from even paying their portion of the tax bill.
The the tax loophole that allows employees of private investment companies to classify their income as "capital gains" and thus pay 15% in taxes rather than 35% remains unclosed. Maybe one of Congress's policy responses should be to muster some nerve and equalize tax treatment. Forget moral hazard: I'd settle for some simple fairness. If they're going to rely on the tax system as an insurance plan, there's no reason they should be exempted from buying in.
Still think this is an issue that is too obtuse? Think of it this way, that extra 20% that those CEO's don't pay is amplified to a huge extent by the fact that they somehow get paid such an obscene amount of money. Drop my taxes by 20%, and I might get to keep an extra $15k. That's some real money to me, but to the government, that's just one flip of the afterburner switch on an F-16 in Iraq. But raise the income tax rate on a CEO making a paltry $100 million a year from 15% to 35%, and voila, the government just got 20 million dollars! Now we're starting to talk about real money here.
We're also talking about priorities. Would we rather that CEO buy himself another four or five beach houses, or pay for child health care for the entire country? If you think I'm joking, you're wrong...
A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year.That’s enough money to deworm every child in the world, cut maternal mortality around the globe by two-thirds and also provide iodized salt to prevent tens of millions of children from suffering mild retardation or worse. Alternatively, it could pay for health care for most uninsured children in America.
Now you might think that there isn't that much money sloshing around out there with the super-rich. Once again, you'd be surprised. Richard Fuld, the longtime chief of Lehman Brothers, which I might note was recently liquidated. He took home nearly half-a-billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007. That's right. Half a BILLION dollars to run a company into the ground. Nice work if you can get it.
Three decades ago, C.E.O.’s typically earned 30 to 40 times the income of ordinary workers. Last year, C.E.O.’s of large public companies averaged 344 times the average pay of workers. Some may say they "earned" it. It sure is hard to say how.
Once again, it comes back to the tax side of it. Is there any reason why you and I should be subsidizing the disgusting wealth of these people? Because that is what we are doing when we give them preferential tax treatment. In the case of Mr. Fuld of Lehman Brothers, you and I subsidized his personal wealth to the tune of about $100 million, give or take. I guess he shouldn't quit his day job...
Last night, in the republican debate, Duncan Hunter argued passionately against closing the prison at Guantanamo, and said the prisoners there in fact have great living conditions. "They have better health care than most Americans," he said.
Wow.
Wal-Mart, the largest employer in America, has decided to cease offering traditional health care plans and move entirely to high-deductible, HSA-style offerings. Wake-Up Wal-Mart got their hands on some internal benefit memos, and here's what they showed:
Among the most striking findings outlined in Wal-Mart’s 2007 benefits booklet is the substantial health care cost a low-paid Wal-Mart worker would be forced to pay under the so-called ‘Value’ plan. A typical individual Wal-Mart worker who enrolls in the Value Plan will face high upfront costs because of a series of high deductibles, including a minimum $1,000 deductible for individual coverage, a $1,000 in-patient deductible per visit, a $500 out-patient surgical deductible per visit, a $300 pharmacy deductible, and a maximum out of pocket expense of $5,000 for an individual per year.
In total, when factoring the maximum out-of-pocket expense and the cost of the yearly premium ($598 a year for an individual under the Value Plan), a typical full-time worker (defined by Wal-Mart as 34 hours) who earns 10.11 an hour or $17,874 a year, would have pay nearly 30 percent of their total income for health care costs alone.
Incredibly, the health care cost burden actually worsens should an uninsured Wal-Mart worker enroll their family under the Value Plan. Again, because of multiple deductibles for each family member, and when factoring in the cost of the medical premium ($780) and maximum out-of-pocket expense ($10,000), a Wal-Mart worker whose family is insured under the “Value Plan” could pay as much as 60 percent of their total income towards health care costs under Wal-Mart’s most “affordable “health care” plan.
More worrisome, though, is that Target has promised the same move, which will mean that the two largest retailers will both eschew traditional health care plans for low-cost (to the company), high-risk (to the employee), astonishingly stingy offerings. Now, of course, any retailers who seek to compete with them -- and that includes supermarkets, clothing outlets, and all the rest -- will be at a competitive disadvantage if they fund traditional health care plans for their employees. It also means producers will be under added pressure by Wal-Mart and Target to make the same shift in order to lower their labor costs and, thus, prices. If the producers refuse, Wal-Mart can simply replace them with their in-house brands. This is how a race to the bottom starts. This is how employer-based health security dies.
Pulled from Ezra Klein on TAPPED
