Wyden’s vision for health care reform begins with making sure everyone is covered
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Apr 24
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Posted in Health Care Reform. |
SEATTLE—If the U.S. wants real health care reform, it needs to make sure everyone is covered. The way to pay for that coverage? Limiting the tax-exempt status of health insurance premiums, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said yesterday at the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists.
Wyden’s Healthy Americans Act—co-sponsored with Republican Robert Bennett of Utah—would require all Americans except those covered by Medicare or in the military to buy a health insurance policy. (The Wall Street Journal‘s Gerald Seib has an excellent summary of the bill here; you can see Wyden discuss the plan here and read the full text here.)
Here are the basics: The government would pay the costs for those at or below the poverty line, and that subsidy would decrease as a family’s income increased. Employers would still be welcome to provide coverage, but if they didn’t, each employee would get a check for the amount that coverage his or her coverage would cost. But as the WSJ’s Seib points out, employers "would pay a fee—a tax, really—for each employee to help fund those federal subsidies to help families buy their policies."
Posted on April 24, 2009 in Health Care Reform.Tags: health-care
