Yesterday Baucus talked about taxing the users of health insurance.

[midnight]

"The House Democratic plan originally called for raising income taxes on upper-income people to pay for covering the uninsured. Baucus has instead proposed a tax on high-cost insurance plans worth more than $8,000 for an individual policy and $21,000 for family coverage."http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33022146/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

Baucus the best insurance lobbiest in the industry.

[MichiganVote]

1. What is so freakin' hard about wealthy individuals paying their fair share in this country?

Taxing the health benefits will only push more people away from care. Its not as if the costs are going to go down.

[Vincardog]

2. Lets not forget that many unions negotiated lower pay raises in return for better insurance benefit

When are we going to hear the "fiscal conservatives" suggest we tax the wall street bonuses and executive stock options to balance anything?

[Igel]

4. A few things.

First, the tax code has favored increasing insurance plans instead of income: you can pay an additional $5k, do you want that as income or as insurance? Well, if it's insurance you get $5k, if it's income you'll lose 16% off the top, plus income tax. So a lot of the "wealthy" insurance plans are ways to avoid taxes. (Note that a lot of the executive pay excesses are similar workarounds to previous attempts to limit executive pay. People find ways to benefit themselves, and there are no shortage of rationalizations when they see a benefit in the offing.)

Second, a lot of people pay almost no income tax. A lot pay no income tax. Some pay a lot of income tax. We had a decent income last year, all things considered--over $60k--and after all the deductions we paid about 5.1% in federal income tax. Was that a fair share? Would 4% have been fairer? 8%? Why? Is it like FDR's raising the price of gold by $0.21, not because he has a good reason rooted in some sort of analysis but because it's 3 x 7, and those are lucky numbers (if we believe Morgenthau)?

At what point is 0% "fair"? When is 40% fair? When we hit the point that 51% pay no income tax, will that be fair? Or is 49% or 55% "fair"? If one's fair and one's not, then, Why?

And what's the basis for saying that 0% is "fair" or 40% is "fair" if I make $18k/year or $180k/year? Do we all have the same basis for the evaluation? Have we voted on it, after a long, dispassionate debate on the matter? Or is "fair" what we've come to accept, after it's been imposed by a majority on the entirety of the population? Perhaps there's a paper that isn't based on numbers, but on some sort of justice- and morality-based calculus?

These aren't easy questions. Even defining "wealthy" is difficult when politics are involved. "Fair" is often just a functional synonym for "What I'm willing to pay to to my duty to others as I see it" or "What I think others that I have no empathy for should pay because of what I think their duty to me or to others that I do have empathy for is."

[MichiganVote]

5. While I appreciate the detail of your response...I don't believe this is complicated.

The political elites, the economic elites, the celebrity elites AND/OR the insurance elites want us to believe it is too complicated...but I don't believe it. We have got to wake up in the country to the fact that the middle cannot carry the poor and the wealthy.

Taxing health care benefits is not productive.

[RB TexLa]

3. So my wife gets to pay for it because she has a good healh insurance plan

wonderful