Liberals’ Agenda: Tax Health Benefits to Fund Corporate Welfare
A feature article in Sunday’s Washington Post provided the latest summary of Obamacare’s woes: Premiums set to spike dramatically, insurers leaving in droves, and millions of Americans held hostage to a lengthening comedy of errors. But liberals stand ready with their answer: More of the same government taxes and spending that created the problem in the first place. To wit, the Left would tax Americans’ employer-provided health benefits to fund a permanent bailout fund for insurance companies.
In a brief released earlier this month, the liberal Robert Wood Johnson Foundation had several possible “solutions” to solve the problem of low enrollment, and low insurer participation, in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. In the document, the foundation suggested making program of reinsurance now scheduled to expire at year’s end permanent:
Extending [Obamacare’s] reinsurance program and its mechanism of financing would more likely have a stabilizing influence [on insurers]. The program could be authorized permanently…or for a set period of time, with authority for CMS [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to continue it if needed….Funds for the reinsurance pool would need to be, as they are currently, collected from individual market insurers, group market insurers, and self-funded plans.
In other words, individuals who do not purchase coverage from an exchange should have their benefits taxed, to fund more corporate welfare subsidies to health insurers, in the hopes that they will continue to offer exchange coverage.
That was the basic premise of the law’s reinsurance mechanism. Put slightly more charitably, Section 1341 of Obamacare imposed an assessment on Americans with employer-provided coverage, or those who purchase health coverage directly from an insurance carrier rather than through a government-run exchange, to help subsidize exchange insurers with high-cost patients.
The assessments were set to last three years—from 2014 through 2016—serving as a transition while the new marketplaces developed. But after three years, the exchanges are in worse shape than ever. Healthy and wealthy individuals have not purchased coverage, making the exchange population sicker than the average employer plan.
Rather than fixing a problem that onerous government regulations—a mandated package of benefits, and rating requirements that have raised premiums so substantially for healthy individuals that many have chosen to forgo coverage—the Left just wants more of the same. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation paper included numerous “solutions” straight out of the liberal playbook: Requiring insurers to participate on exchanges; a government-run “public option” intended to destroy private coverage, richer subsidies; and new penalties for late enrollment. In other words, more of the taxes, spending, and regulations that brought us this mess in the first place—not to mention the permanent insurer bailout fund.
Two clear ironies stand out when it comes to the reinsurance proposal. First, the Obama administration has already given insurers far more than they expected—or the law allows—on the reinsurance front. Government officials have repeatedly increased reinsurance reimbursement levels, giving insurers nearly 50% more support from the program in 2014 than they originally expected. And the non-partisan Congressional Research Service believes that the Administration has violated the law by prioritizing payments to insurers over payments to the Treasury—giving insurers billions of dollars in extra funding that legally should be returned to taxpayers.
Second, Barack Obama himself campaigned vigorously against “taxing health benefits” in 2008. He ran ads attacking John McCain for making health insurance subject to income tax, saying the tax would fund subsidies that would go straight to insurance companies. Yet Obamacare contained not one, but two, separate “assessments” (read: taxes) on health plans—the first to fund comparative effectiveness research that could be utilized by health plans reimbursement and coverage decisions, and the second for the “temporary” reinsurance program. After violating his campaign pledge not once, but twice, in Obamacare itself, the president’s allies want Congress to make permanent the tax on health benefits—to finance a bailout fund that will go—you guessed it!—straight to the insurance companies.
With labor force participation still historically low, and Americans struggling with high health costs, now is certainly not the time to tax the health coverage that businesses provide to working families so that insurers can receive billions more dollars in bailout funds. Congress should not even think about throwing good money after bad in a vain attempt to keep the sinking Obamacare ship afloat.