Health care and taxes

One of the top issues concerning voters this past election was the massive amount of debt the U.S. has accumulated and how we are going to repay it.

To address this issue, President Obama appointed Democrat Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff for President Clinton, and Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, to lead a commission charged with finding ways to address this national crisis. The report is comprehensive and covers everything from increasing taxes in some areas to lowering overall tax rates. All of the ideas are worth investigating, though some are deeply concerning.

One area of concern is the limitation or elimination of tax breaks for employer sponsored health insurance. The commission is not the only group proposing this option. The Bipartisan Policy Center is also proposing a cap on health care tax breaks and beginning in 2018, the elimination of them over a 10-year period.

Tennessee's Democrat Gov. Phil Bredesen argued in an opinion editorial for The Wall Street Journal, also reprinted in the Southeast Missourian on Oct. 27, that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will push more people off employer sponsored health insurance and on to insurance to be purchased through an exchange. The governor argued that the subsidies offered by the federal government for individuals to purchase insurance could potentially provide a savings for employers, but the overall health care costs would not decrease. They would simply be transferred to the federal government.

If the plan is to reduce government spending and thus tackle the national debt, it does not make sense to simply play a shell game with health care costs.