This morning I read an article entitled “GOP taking aim at health insurance paid by employers.” Let me save you some time, it’s another Ownership Society bit of propaganda, stating “they want to erect a system in which workers, instead of looking to employers for health insurance, would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I feel that traditional health insurance drives up costs by, among other things, directly short-circuiting market forces. Most people have no idea what their health insurance costs, because it is paid for by their employer. There is no ability, let alone incentive, to try and get a better deal. This GOP proposal largely addresses that problem, although I must admit some amusement that the party of the Supply Siders is proposing a Demand Side solution to the problem. The benefits of this idea are not only that people would be in control of their own medical and health insurance expenses, but also that it would limit the medical expenses that have to be funneled through the overhead (read: unnecessary added expenses) of the insurance company, and that Doctors would actually get what they bill in a timely fashion. Win-Win, so far.
However, there is a bit of this puzzle that is missing, and it can be fixed with a little change of wording on the 1040. Scoll down to the instructions for lines 28 and 31. You can probably get them on one screen together. Line 28 allows you to deduct personal contributions to a Health Savings Account, unless your employer contributed. Oh, yeah, and you need another form. Line 31 allows the self-employed to deduct health insurance premiums.
Change that line so health insurance premiums are deductible, period, without having to itemize, and we might just have a plan to rein in costs.
Of course, this still doesn’t do a darn thing for 45 million Americans who don’t have health insurance at all, mainly because they can’t afford it. They won’t be able to afford this proposal either.
In closing, by the time I finished watching this video clip of Jon Stewart commenting on a Good Morning America interview with the CEO of WalMart, an interesting question came to mind. Why does the CEO of one of the biggest companies in America so rarely appear on America’s number one business news channel, CNBC? (Apparently he was on January 13, but strictly to talk about how they will counteract perceptions, probably to say the exact same things he said on GMA. I can’t tell because I run an “unsupported operating system.”) Maybe because Mark Haines wouldn’t be as nice as Charlie Gibson.