I’m pleased to announce that we’ve recently confirmed that Consumer-focused Healthcare will be blogging at the World Health Care Congress April 21-23 in Washington DC.
I’m personally excited to meet a number of the luminaries and hope to set up some podcasts during the event.
Please let me know if any of you will be in attendence– I’d love to catch up.
Interesting op-ed from the WSJ on the unfairness of employer-only deductions for health insurance.
If the purpose of health-care reform is to decrease the ranks of the uninsured, these job-related tax breaks are poorly targeted, even regressive. The more generous the employer health plan, the more the subsidies increase. On average, lower-wage workers have more limited coverage as part of their compensation, usually from small- or medium-sized businesses. Estimates show that the subsidy is worth more than $3,000 for upper-income families (with higher marginal tax rates), and less than $1,000 for those on the lower income rungs.
This does bring up interesting questions on why Democrats are pushing for increasing amounts of insurance instead of increasing the equity of the insurance subsidy.
If these losses were converted to the equivalent of direct spending, the tax exemption would have cost more than $208 billion in 2006. The only federal programs that cost more are Social Security, Medicare and national defense. But all that money props up only employer-provided insurance. Individuals who buy policies don’t get any tax breaks and pay with after-tax dollars.
From Medicine to McKinsey to Main St