One day soon, I would like to walk into my neighborhood supermarket, load up my cart with goodies and walk out the door. When I’m confronted by security about the matter of paying for the stuff, I’ll just tell them to make everyone else in the store pick up the tab. If I lived in Virginia, I’d tell ‘em to go see Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who says I don’t have to pay.

Health reform is (almost) law. And while the Senate must still agree to a package of technical fixes approved by the House late last night, we now can see historic changes in the way we will buy health insurance. We can also see big new tax increases, at least for some relatively high-income people. But the most important won’t take effect for years. And there’s the rub.

President Obama’s proposal to boost the Medicare tax is a key element of the compromise health bill that looks increasingly as if it is going to become law. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it would generate over $180 billion over the next decade. And exactly as intended, the tax increase would fall almost entirely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers, according to a new analysis by my Tax Policy Center colleagues.

Critics of health reform legislation assert that it would crush small business. The National Federation of Independent Business, for instance, insists reform will have “a costly and punitive impact” on these firms.
I do not understand this argument. Small businesses face huge disadvantages in today’s insurance market. Unlike their larger competitors, they can’t self-insure or bargain for low premiums and their small risk pools make them highly susceptible to huge rate hikes if just a single employee gets sick. The health bill would help level that playing field.

President Obama’s new $950 billion health plan would impose a new “payroll” tax on investment income, and keep a watered-down version of the Senate proposal to tax high-cost health plans.

The delivery was quintessential Barack Obama, which is to say brilliant, but the words could have been Bill Clinton’s.
The lofty principles remain, but the agenda has become pedestrian—constrained by a $1.4 trillion budget deficit and partisan trench warfare where progress is measured in inches and not miles.

George Bush could have proposed the Senate health bill. If he had, those Republicans who now loathe the measure would be at the barricades defending it. And those Democrats who backed Obama-care for the past year would have been hoisting their pitchforks and demanding its demise.

“Democrats health bills depend on forcing individuals to buy insurance or face severe fines or imprisonment.”
George Will, Nov, 19, 2009
Before we spin off into a Thanksgiving reprise of last summer’s death panel lunacy, let’s be clear. Nothing in Will’s statement is true.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has pulled together a health bill that relies on three major revenue sources (and many smaller ones) to help support the cost of new insurance subsidies for those with low- and moderate-incomes.

In the ongoing search for money to pay for health reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reportedly wants to raise the Medicare payroll tax rate for high earners. It is not the best way to generate revenue, but it is not the worst either.