Adam Searing wants to deny people greater choices and more affordability. He wants to continue the favorable tax treatment of employer-based insurance, which essentially locks people into getting insurance through their employer. But if you lose your job, you also lose your insurance and the tax benefit that comes with it. Does Adam care? It’s difficult to say. But he seems more interested in preserving the status quo, perhaps because he believes that this is the track that will get us to socialized medicine… And he’s right about that.
But let me tell you what he’s wrong (i.e. FALSE) about:
First, giving refundible tax credits is neither "radical" nor "dangerous". Tax credits allow people like waitresses, young people, the unemployed and the underemployed to get health insurance as easily (read: affordably, equitably) as someone who gets their insurance through work. It’s that simple. When I was an adjunct professor teaching philosophy and making $20K a year, I had to buy health insurance on the individual market. And yet someone making $45K at a swanky office got subsidized to buy his health insurance by as much as $2000 a year. That’s fundamentally unfair. But you don’t have simply to believe me, ask the professors over at Duke University about this perverse, inequitable system.
Second, Mr. Searing tries to argue that the way one would pay for this system is to take the tax benefit away from employer-based insurance. This is simply FALSE. Notice how people in the background of his video keep laughing? It’s because the claims he makes are laughable. All a refundable tax credit does is give you the same benefit whether you buy your healthcare on the individual market or at work–it doesn’t matter which. People who would get their healthcare through work would enjoy the same benefit as they did before. So Searing is being, well, dishonest to claim otherwise. Perhaps it’s desperation. Because tax credits would go a long way to reforming the healthcare market that he and his counterparts on the left have been busily trying to tear down, distort and ruin.
Finally, that means his ‘150 million people would be in danger of losing their health benefits’ is just wrong. Mr. Searing would like for wealthier, gainfully employed people to continue to be subsidized while poorer, underemployed must fend for themselves? This suggests to me that he does not care so much about those people – including the uninsured and unemployed – who need affordable coverage, which tax subsidies would rescue. One should be very suspicious of his motives, then, as he generally claims to want to help cover the uninsured, which tax credits would most assuredly do. In fact, one would be crazy not to take $2500 for health insurance and not spend it! Carrots are preferable to Searing’s sticks.
But in short, he offers NO EVIDENCE whatsoever that people with pre-existing conditions would be harmed by this. Indeed, if you have such a condition and lose your job, your healthcare is currently not portable. Under a system in which more people (not all, perhaps) get their insurance on the (more competive and thus less expensive) individual market, those people would have less chance of losing their coverage (expensive COBRA notwithstanding) no matter what happens with their job. And they’d get tax help to boot.
Adam Searing may have his heart in the right place on healthcare. But his head is totally in the wrong place. His hostility to tax credits reveals a genuine fear that his project to socialized medicine will fail if government stops privileging people with jobs. But if he really wants to help people, he’ll join groups on the left who actually see the value in such a simple and elegant proposal.
-Max Borders
Remember, Adam thinks Medicaid provides better coverage than private insurance.
He talks about premium savings from getting more people on Medicaid, but ignores the higher taxes that would be required to cover what he admits would be higher government spending.
I figured there would be a rebuttal to Adam’s post, but was hoping for a video rebuttal. :-) Still, words are words.
Max, I’m by no means an expert on the health coverage debate, so maybe you can enlighten me and explain where the money to cover the individual tax credits would come from? If it won’t come from the pot that goes toward employer based subsidies, where will it come from?
After reading this post, I went back and re-watched Adam’s video, and nowhere in the video do I hear him actually say that: 1) he supports the current employer-based subsidy system as the solution to our current health care problems; or 2) wants to limit peoples’ choices. My guess is you’ve somehow deduced this from his argument that individual tax credits are a bad idea, although I don’t see the logic to support these statements.
Adam, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always thought that in your utopia, there would be universal coverage for all, where consumers could still exercise choice as to who they would see and their treatment options.
I still fail to see how individual tax credits would help someone like John McCain, who has a history of health issues, find affordable health coverage versus the benefits he enjoys from his current government-based plan.
I know I’d trade my BCBS plan for his plan any day of the week.
Well Jniff, the money would come from: 1) people opting to use their tax credit on private insurance (individual market) instead of employer insurance; 2) people opting to use their tax credit on private insurance (individual market) instead of employer-based insurance, and 3) the gains achieved through making the individual market an order of magnitude more competitive given that people would have so many more choices that whatever their employer offers. I don’t understand how it isn’t simple to see that subsidizing employer based insurance is a WWII dinosaur that denies people more options. I guess I needed to explain it though: if someone gave you $50 a week to shop at Whole Foods, why would you shop at Fresh Market? That also puts Fresh Market at a competitive disadvantage and incents Whole Foods to raise prices. Simple economics.
As far as McCain is concerned. Ever heard of a high risk pool? They are in 30+ states.
I love this comment to Searing’s post over at the “pulse” by Schofield:
“who the hell wants to spend their precious time shopping for health insurance? It’s already confusing as heck with a large employer handling it for you.”
In other words, you stupid unwashed masses are so hapless that the nanny state needs to step in and just do the thinking for you! Something eerily Orwellian about that mindset.
Somehow, hundreds of millions of people manage to navigate auto, home and life insurance policies and decide what’s best for their family’s needs. Schofield, Searing and Co. think bureaucrats in Raleigh and DC are better equipped to make those decisions for you.