Getting Healthy: An Overdue Tax-the-Rich Prescription

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Getting Healthy:
A Tax-the-Rich Prescription
To achieve anything that resembles meaningful health care reform, activists are realizing, we need to focus on the grand concentrations of wealth inside the health care industry — and beyond.

June 1, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


Later this month, in both the House and the Senate, lawmakers will likely begin “marking up” legislation that might finally give all Americans what the citizens of every other developed nation in the world already have: access to affordable health insurance.

How will lawmakers foot the bill?

“We'll pay for it,” Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, promised last week, “in a balanced way.”

What does that mean? Baucus, a key figure in the congressional health care deliberations, appears willing to “balance” the burden of financing health care on the backs of average Americans who already have health insurance.

Health insurance benefits don’t currently count as taxable income. Baucus two weeks ago included taxing health benefits on a list of “policy options” for financing reform he released with his Republican colleague, Chuck Grassley.

Also included in the Baucus funding option list: an assortment of other proposals that aim directly at the pockets of ordinary people. His committee is even considering expanding federal payroll taxes to college students in work-study programs.

Curiously missing from this “balanced” approach to bankrolling health care reform: any move to tax the individuals and corporations that have profited so lavishly from our dysfunctional health care status quo.

This week the pushback — against the Baucus “balance” blinkers — begins. A coalition of health care reform-minded labor, religious, and community groups will be meeting this Wednesday in Washington to lay the groundwork for a tax-the-rich offensive. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/june1a.html

[BeFree]

1. Health care riches...

....are blood money. Being that eventually, everyone who goes to a doctor is gonna die, the vast riches made from the dead and dying are made from patients blood and bones. Vampires are relatively more honest.

[mopinko]

4. that kind of inflammatory rhetoric does nothing for this debate.

besides which, it is not correct. some who go to doctors live another 90 years.
the miraculous cures that american medicine has given to many deserve a little respect. but i know that 'eat the rich' is as much as some here are able to grasp.

[Tigress DEM]

7. I don't know about that. "Riches" implies not just supplying medical services...

It implies trying to make as many bucks off of it as possible. People who have come to DU with stories of hospitals trying to shut off life support, not because the patient is truly a lost cause, but because insurance says they've reached their limit.... At least 2 times here on DU I've seen posts where relatives have fought back and moved their loved ones who managed to recover significantly in hospital settings that weren't about the bottom line.

AND the honesty part of it is kind of elegant sarcasm. Come on, that is classic DU.

Hospitals and physicians, nurses et al.. who provide vital services to the community aren't the enemy of DU, but the insurance industry that makes caring providers just as upset as we are by wrapping everyone up in so much red tape just so they can hide their insane cost structures so we can't actually see that aspirins given in the hospital cost $6 apiece, those who pad their pockets at the expense of people suffering and/or needing quality medical attention without having to take out a second mortgage and get family members to sell some vital organs just to afford to keep someone alive... those whose only goal is to get rich and to hell with anyone else.. I think those are the people I would say are not even as honest as vampires. NObody in the millionaire bracket "needs" money so much they need to scam people who are in vunerable situations medically.

[stray cat]

2. Taxing those with health care from employers as well

ouch!

[Tigress DEM]

9. Yeah, that is the Baucus plan. Hit the "average" American even harder.

BUT the alternative is interesting:

AVERAGE Americans already PAY the Medicare Tax. Only those who get their income from "investments" don't. SO this is another dis-incentive for the uber rich to manipulate the stock values on paper to make huge gains at the expense of the rest of us. If they make huge money they will be taxed on it.

This Medicare tax currently only applies to payroll income. If you work for wages or salary, you pay this Medicare levy. If you get your income from investments, you don’t.

One Citizens for Tax Justice proposal to end this inequity would apply the 1.45 percent Medicare tax that currently applies only to paychecks to all income. Another would tax paycheck income over $250,000 on joint returns to a higher than 1.45 percent tax rate.

Still another option — that Citizens for Tax Justice gives a special spotlight — would combine these two approaches but exempt senior citizen couples from paying any additional Medicare tax on their first $100,000 of income.

This combined proposal would raise $44.7 billion in 2012, a major chunk of the $106.8 billion the total Citizens for Tax Justice package would collect — without taking any appreciable dollars out of the pockets of families in the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. income distribution.

[Cresent City Kid]

11. Food for thought

Since many middle class Americans have been drawn into the stock market via 401k's, I'm not as eager to tax dividends as I used to be, but if it were weighted to tax more in the upper bracket, it would be something to consider.

I also think the brackets should be reconfigured to match actual income disparity. The current top bracket is essentially a flat tax, the same for $300,000 as $300,000,000. When the notion of taxing more at the upper end is brought up, the small businessman making $300,000 is trotted out as the victim as the top 1% hides behind him.

[Wednesdays]

3. K&R

:kick:

[MasonJar]

5. Montana, kick him out in 2010.

[Tigress DEM]

8. With steel tipped boots.

[Tigress DEM]

6. If we outlawed "loopholes" "tax shelters" etc... Would a flat 10% tax work?

If the top 5% - 20% have 50% of the money and they ACTUALLY PAY 10% tax on that amount and the rest of the country pays 10% of their income to taxes, wouldn't an across the board tax rate like that result in a surplus since most in the top bracket avoid taxes with shrewd accounting and the rest of us pay through the nose?

[Tansy_Gold]

10. I don't want access to affordable health insurance

I want access to affordable health CARE.

I don't want the parasitic insurance companies -- who provide NO HEALTH CARE -- skimming off the top so a few filthy rich bastards can live in luxury. When their motivation is their own bottom line, they are not doing health care any favors. Get rid of 'em.



TG