Congressman Ryan’s Health Care Booby Trap
by Michael Halasy
Congressman Ryan’s Health Care Booby Trap
Much has been said about “repeal and replace” it has become almost as much a part of GOP lexicon as “drill baby, drill”. The GOP despite having been supportive of the framework for the ACA previously, wants badly to discredit the administration and claim a victory in the name of “freedom”. Too bad history shows that the Heritage Foundation and VP Stuart Butler supported a plan almost virtually identical to the ACA.
Now, along comes Congressman Ryan, despite being rebuffed last year for the “Roadmap”, he has come along with a v 2.0. Unfortunately, he is making headway. I won’t comment on the other aspects of the new and improved Roadmap, but it seems to be just as much of a disaster as the previous one. The House has already passed it of course, and Romney, aka etch a sketch, has enthusiastically received the Congressman’s endorsement and has endorsed Ryan’s plan as well.
So we know that the GOP, primarily the Tea Partier’s, despise the individual mandate as a violation of their freedom. Ezra Klein had a great article last week about the hidden mandate in the Ryan bill , but does not discuss the fact that it will essentially eliminate employer based insurance. Now, Ryan’s plan assumes that the state based exchanges (sound familiar?) will produce a lot of savings, and he assumes that market forces will do even more. To that end, he offers a couple of tax credits. But, oh by the way, you LOSE employer based coverage under Ryan. It severs it completely. So an individual gets a 2,300 dollar tax credit (family is 5,700) to buy insurance. I can tell you now, that the average per the Kaiser Family Foundation for a single individual is much higher than 2,300.
Family plan premiums are $15,073 on average, while coverage for single employees is about $5,429.
Workers contributed an average of $921 toward the premium of single coverage and $4,129 for family plans.
What this means, is, that under the Ryan plan, your single insurance premium will cost you 2,208 MORE per year out of your own pocket at current cost. Family plans will cost you 5,244 MORE per year out of your own pocket.
That’s the repeal and replace plan folks…..That’s what the House voted on and passed…..That’s what Romney endorsed….THAT’s the GOP plan…
It’ll save businesses money, and it’s great for corporate America. However, it is not so great for the average small family living on 40-45k per year combined income.
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So an individual gets a 2,300 dollar tax credit (family is 5,700) to buy insurance.
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And of course your employer will raise your salary by the amount they were spending on health insurance.
/snicker
It would allow a nice natural experiment to show once and for all if the economist’s assumption that employers would simply pass on the savings to employees. Oh, wait, that’s the assumption on the employer share of Social Security and Medicare taxes, not health insurance. My bad.
So when can we expect the Democratic national party to begin making that simple explanation repeatedly? “The Republican Party has just passed legislation which: ends your employer contribution to your family’s health coverage; that’s been replaced by a small tax credit that ends up costing you $$$$s more to obtain that health care coverage; and any assurance of reduced costs is little more than an ideological pipe dream.”.
Said part is, in the long run it will actually hurt employers as they scramble to keep head count low vs the number of people out at any given time.
Also, what could the insurers be thinking? Do they really think people will be all of a sudden able to pay the premiums even with the voucher? I mean, this looks like a kill private insurance bill if I ever saw one.
Good point Daniel. Right now the health care insurance industry is in as good a position as it can hope for. Once the ability to play for their products has been compromised will they be able to offer insurance only to those who can afford it? And how will the costs of insurance for therich only be contained? Will employers have the option to offer health care coverage to executive staff only? Will health care coverage become a perk for highly valued (lord only knows who they may be beyond the boss’s girlfriend) employees and the management?
That’s far too wordy and “brainy” a retort for the average Uh-murikan to take in. You need to turn it into a bumper sticker sized slogan that includes code words like “Jesus”, “family values”, “raise taxes”, “socialism”, etc.
Ex:
“Republicans just held a death panel where they decided to kill grandma by putting their government hands all over her Medicare.”
“Republicans just voted to raise your taxes, confiscate your family’s health coverage and take Jesus out of your health plan.”
Unfortunately, the Ds really work for the same crooks as the Rs, so there won’t be an effective rebuttal, brainy or otherwise.
“ Too bad history shows that the Heritage Foundation and VP Stuart Butler supported a plan almost virtually identical to the ACA.”
i would recommend actually thinking about that for a little while.
The ACA is a Republican plan. Even if the Republicans are trying to blame the “mandate” on the Democrats, they will be quite happy with ACA. hundreds of billions extra per year for the insurance company. and the Dems get the odium of the mandate.
As for the Ryan plan, I guess you folks never heard of offering them a “choice” that will make them think they have no choice but to take your first offer.
It is a Known Fact that Democrats want Socialized Medicine (which would kill private insurance) and that ACA is a step in that direction, so …
Yes, single payer will shrink the private insurance industry. However, that is not the issue. My response was in referrence to the favoritism displayed toward all things private corporate by the conservative mind. Thus, how is it the conservative mind (Ryan proposal) has decided to throw the private insurer out over other huge corporate sectors of the economy?
Stay on subject please.
Coberly,
Please explain that last paragraph. Who is the them, they and your? I suspect that you’re suggesting that Ryan and his cohorts have offered up an extreme budget plan that will require the Democrats to give up any reasonable idea of a fair and balanced budget proposal. If so, you may be right given the feckless behavior of that group and their President in the past. On the other hand the Ryan Plan is so draconian and so transparently so that one would hope that some group of Democrats might want to take that advantage to the voters. Is an effort to fight really that far fetched? Are both parties simply colluding by way of a contrived negotiation over a budget plan that is already preconceived and distorted away from middle class beneficians?
Jack
of course i don’t know. but i have been around too long to think that all conspiracy theories are paranoid. Obama has given us SS as welfare/deficit-spending on the short path to ending its usefulness as insurance so people can retire at a reasonable age.
the obama health plan is a right wing republican plan. but because it’s obama’s and the democrats of course the liberals are ready to die for it. and absolutely, the right is smart enough to offer a plan further to right of obamacare in order to make sure the left fights hard for it.
i doubt very much if either Obama or Ryan understands his role in the scam. Both of them have advisers that do.
oh, the “them” in the last paragraph you refer to is “folk” in this case us liberal folk, pretty much getting fooled again.
and yes i can see how my sentence is confusing. hope this is enough to make it clearer.
do not imagine that the people behind obamacare and SS payroll tax holiday give a damn about right or left, government or free enterprise. they care about power and money, and they’ll take it anyway they can get it. it is ludicrous to suppose they are worried about “big government.” they own the government. but it helps them to keep half the population worried about big government and the other half of the population worried about the lunatic right.