Senate Eyes Taxing Health Care Benefits to Fund Health Care Reform

  Just yesterday I wrote about how the senate was going to debate taxing soda and other sugary drinks in order to pay for this president’s health care plan. I also mentioned that there is no way in hell that it would stop there and guess what, it isn’t. They are looking at many more taxes as well.

  These taxes include another $2 a pack tax on cigarettes, and taxes on alcohol. As well as capping the amount of tax deductible charitable donations that a person can be claim. I wish that I could say I am surprised but I am not.

   But there is another idea being floated around that I find quite interesting. The idea of removing the tax exemption for people who are paying for health care through their employer is being explored. 

  Now, unless I misremember last year’s disaster of an election cycle (and I am trying to forget it, John McCain included),  John McCain had proposed taxing people’s health care benefits and was run through the ringer by the soon to be president. The rallying cry was that John McCain was going to tax people’s health care benefits for the first time in history, an idea that we were told the current president opposed. Here is what the soon to be president said during the campaign about taxing people’s health care benefits:

He taxes health care benefits for the first time in history; millions lose the health care they have; millions pay more for the health care they get; drug and insurance companies continue to profit; and middle class families watch the system they rely on begin to unravel before their eyes

  He also called the plan radical, but now his party is looking at the same idea that the president lambasted during the campaign. I would be willing to bet that the president will sign this new tax into law even though he said that he opposed it if it means getting his beloved health care reform passed.

   The theory behind this idea, or more accurately the spin being used to defend this reversal,  is that because people don’t have to pay taxes on their health care payments that it promotes the abuse of the health care benefit. It encourages “excess consumption” of health care benefits. Therefor it should be taxed to stop people from abusing the health care THAT THEY PAY FOR!

    Suddenly that free health care doesn’t look so free does it? Suddenly it is more than obvious that 95% of Americans are not only not going to get that tax cut, but rather that same 95% of Americans are going to get a tax increase.

  This is something that we all should have seen coming, many of us did, the more far left a person is the more that they endorse tax increases and this is the most left leaning person to ever occupy the White House. The further to the left that a person is, the more they endorse big government bureaucracies and bloated social programs, those programs cost money and that money has to come from somewhere.

   And we all know where that money ends up coming from. Ordinary, average, working class Americans. You know, the same people that this president claimed were going to get a tax cut.