Arrgh! Health Insurance!

Editor's note: I am not anti-Republican. Just anti-stupid.

Yesterday, I believe, I heard about John McCain's brilliant idea for health care reform. He's going to tax anyone who has an employer that cares enough about its employees to pay for some of their health insurance deductible. What ever money the employer pays for your deductible is going to be considered income and therefore taxable. Then they will give a credit for 2500 for a single person or 5000 for a family to apply towards the extra taxes you would have to pay. This is to encourage people to leave the safety of their employer-sponsored plan and forage out into the wide, wonderful world of the unregulated health insurance market. There you will find no leverage, no group discounts, plenty of years wasted on pre-existing conditions and the insurance companies have all the power.

The idea behind this is that this will give everyone the chance to get health insurance subsidized by the government. So for a family you would get 5000 a year to pay for health insurance. The problem is the market is unregulated and they can charge whatever they want. My employer is generous enough to pay all of my insurance premium which is $10,800 a year. Serious. That $5k from the government is not going to be very helpful if you still have to pay $5k a year for the premium. Most people who don't have insurance cant afford an additional $5k a year. Plus this amount is not going to increase over the next 10 years. So when the premium is $15k per year that $5k isn't going to be very helpful if you can't afford to shell out an extra thousand a month. Also there won't be enough money collected from the extra taxes to really pay for this so the money is going to have to come from somewhere.

So this sounds like a great plan if you make a lot of money or have so many houses you can't remember how many you have. Nice.

P.S.
It's not that I don't think that everyone should be able to have health insurance, I just don't think it should be subsidized only by people who have employer-sponsored insurance. There needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the insurance market so they can't gouge you for coverage and deny payment for services.