First the mandatory insurance, from the Institute for Health Freedom:
(Feb. 23, 2010)—President Obama’s nationalized mandatory health-insurance proposal (released yesterday, 2/22) puts American families and small-business owners under the control of Big Brother regarding health-insurance coverage decisions.
- The proposal requires Americans to buy federally dictated health-insurance coverage or pay fines (which likely will increase over time, just as Medicare payroll taxes are being increased under this proposal).
- Americans will be coerced (through tax incentives) into politicized health-insurance exchanges.
- Remember the promise that if you like your existing coverage you can keep it? That promise will expire in just 8 years (in 2018) when “grandfathered” plans will be required to cover medical preventive services with no cost-sharing.
The high implicit tax rates, from Michael Cannon at Cato on how insurance subsidies would discourage people from earning more:
… over broad ranges of income, families of four would see their take-home pay rise by an average of 28 cents of each additional dollar earned. In some cases, it would rise as little as 10 cents for each additional dollar earned.
For more on this, see the study: Obama’s Prescription for Low-Wage Workers: High Implicit Taxes, Higher Premiums.
Lastly, the death spiral. Writes Cannon:
by requiring insurers to cover all applicants without regard to illness, each of these health plans would remove any penalty on waiting until you are sick to purchase coverage. Therefore — even after accounting for all relevant taxes, subsidies, and penalties — these plans would create large financial incentives for healthy people to drop out of the market, which would cause premiums to rise for those who remain. That would in turn encourage more healthy people to drop out, which would cause premiums to rise further, and so on.
Remember, you can tell your Congressman or Senator what you think of these ideas.
