As of today it looks like the Baucus bill on health care has a decent shot at passing, so a timely look at how it is going to be paid for is in order. Luckily, Kevin Hassett looks the numbers and they don't look good for most of us. Some highlights...or lowlights as the case may be:
[T]he Baucus plan holds that if you have an insurance plan with a high premium (exceeding $8,000 per individual or $21,000 per family), your insurance company would pay a tax of 35 cents for every dollar that your plan exceeds the threshold.
Ostensibly the excise tax is a tax on insurers. But as with other excise taxes (gasoline, cigarettes), the cost would undoubtedly be passed on to the consumer, in the form of more expensive insurance.The report projected that the excise tax would raise about $52 billion in 2019. Of that, about $8.9 billion would come from taxpayers with incomes of less than $50,000; about $19.4 billion from taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000; and about $17.4 billion from taxpayers with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000.
Add those up, and you see that about 87 percent of the revenue in the original Baucus proposal to finance Obamacare would come from individuals with incomes of less than $200,000.
The remarkable thing is that this revenue comes from low- and middle-income people who already have insurance. Many members of organized labor have these "gold-plated" plans. And they would be worse off, not better, because of Obamacare.
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