A lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes in various committees in the Senate in regards to the Democrat takeover of your healthcare. A couple of updates for you, among the flood of information you are already trying to digest.
First is a vote in the Senate Finance Committee which reduces the amount of compensation that insurance executives receive that is eligible for tax credit. They have moved the limit from the current $1 million amount to $500K. In effect it is an effort to force insurance companies to reduce the amount of compensation that insurance executives can receive. The net effect will be that the executives leave the sector and go to sector not regulated by congress, like say auto parts or electronics. The job skills they posses does not limit them to just working in insurance, and would therefore exacerbate the hemorrhaging that will happen in the health insurance sector if any of the current legislation is passed.
Voting 14-8, the committee approved an amendment that would limit the tax deductibility of compensation for insurance executives to $500,000 a year. The limit would apply to executives at companies that get significant business generated by the bill's mandate that nearly all Americans must have insurance. Under current law, businesses can deduct up to $1 million a year in compensation for executives.
Once again the disconnected in D.C. just don't understand how things work in the private sector. Just because they are lawyers and that is the only they can do, doesn't mean the rest of us aren't just a tad more flexible.
The second piece of news to come out is yet another study showing that insurance policies could increase by as much as 54% under the current legislation. A report which of course the White House dismissed before even seeing it.
Another day, another study confirming that ObamaCare will increase the price of health insurance. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has found that premiums in the individual market will rise on average by 54% over the status quo, which translates into an extra $3,341 a year for families and $1,576 for singles. The White House denounced the report as a "sham" before it was even released, which shows how seriously it takes such concerns.
The WSJ goes on to point out how the Blue Shield report is more accurate then the numbers the CBO had to work with.
The Blue Cross study is in fact more precise than CBO's because it is based on real market data, rather than modeling assumptions. The association mined the actuarial data from its six million individual or small-business policies, nearly one-eighth of those sold in the U.S.
Lo and behold, Blue Cross found costs will rise if Democrats force insurers to cover anyone who applies and then limit how much insurers are allowed to charge based on age or health condition. Economists call this adverse selection; people will wait until they're sick to buy coverage, and the Democratic rules make it perfectly rational for them to do so.
So today congress voted to force the best and brightest from executive positions in the insurance industry and the White House chose to ignore another report that doesn't support their pipe dream, just like they do with reports critical of global warming.
If any of the plans currently in Congress ever see the light of day it will be the death of private health insurance in America, which of course is the real goal of the Democrats. They feel the more people dependent on the government the more voters they get, and at the end of the day that is what this is really about, meaning all of the government takeover of various private business sectors. Power. They don't give a damn about the average American, all they care about is solidifying their hold on power and becoming the ruling class, separate from the ruled.
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