Free Republic

Massachusetts municipalities that offer employees, retirees, and elected officials the most generous and costly health insurance plans will feel the squeeze of the new national health care law’s tax on “Cadillac’’ insurance plans. A family health plan that costs more than $27,500 would be subject to a 40 percent tax on every dollar spent above that threshold. The tax, set to take effect in 2018, would be levied on insurers, who would probably pass it on to municipalities and other employers. A few cities and towns already have family plans that exceed $27,500, and many others are on track to...

Health Care Reform: The Senate parliamentarian dims GOP hopes on a reconciliation bill that contains even more onerous taxes and even a financial incentive to lay people off. No wonder Speaker Pelosi is laughing. We'll acknowledge that the signing of ObamaCare into law is a historic event, but we think the Weather Channel broadcasting the signing ceremony was a bit much. On the other hand, stormy political weather and more dark clouds lay ahead. The cries of "repeal" and "remember in November" are rising, and state attorneys general are taking the feds to court over the unconstitutional mandates and usurpation...

Union Influence: The White House picks its most frequent visitor to sit on its deficit commission. He believes in big government, in big spending, and that the workers of the world should unite. What could go wrong? Computer security firms have been known to hire the best former hackers because they know best how to stop others like them. But the appointment of Andy Stern, president of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU), to a bipartisan commission to come up with ways to deal with the rapidly rising federal budget deficit is like having a serial arsonist organize Fire Prevention...

President Barack Obama is a man who remembers his allies, especially in preparation for a showdown. This Monday, three days before today's all-day televised bipartisan health care summit, the president unveiled his latest plan for a health care policy overhaul. The measure, 11 pages long, resembles the Senate bill passed on Christmas Eve by a 60-39 margin. Obama knows the prospects for passage are uphill. The plan is costly and its burden will fall on a great many Americans, not just "the rich." Among its more controversial features, the White House proposal retains, in scaled-down form, a key Senate provision: a...

An agreement to tax high-cost, employer-sponsored health insurance plans, announced with fanfare by the White House and labor unions last month, is losing support from labor leaders, who say the proposal is too high a price to pay for the limited health care package they expect to emerge from Congress. But the White House is still urging Congress to adopt the excise tax as a way to help pay for President Obama’s ambitious health care proposals. With support for the tax eroding, Congressional leaders are searching for alternative sources of revenue. The search has some urgency because Mr. Obama has...

Politics: The GOP has been invited by the administration to a health care summit. Will it be an effort to pass real reform, or an attempt to lure Republicans into a bipartisan disaster? When Democrats thought their absolute majorities in the House and Senate guaranteed the passage of government-run health care, they had no use for either GOP input or transparency. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were quite content to fundamentally transform one-sixth of the American economy behind the closed doors of a Senate room. They dismissed the rising anger of the...

Voters aren’t happy with the latest tax proposed to help pay for the trillion-dollar national health care plan, and they’re even unhappier with exempting labor unions from that tax. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 33% of U.S. voters support enacting a significant excise tax on the most expensive health insurance plans provided by employers. Sixty-three percent (63%) oppose the excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” health insurance plans, up five points from late December. Only 10% Strongly Support it and 42% Strongly Oppose the excise tax. Labor unions, an important constituency in the Democratic Party, complained...

Q. ... [W]hy is it fair for individuals who have so-called Cadillac plans that have been negotiated through collective bargaining agreements to be exempt until 2018 from the proposed excise tax, whereas those who might be in the exact same situation but are not part of labor unions -- even if they want to be and their company resisted, or many they're in right-to-work states -- why is it fair for one group to not get a tax and others to -- MR. GIBBS: I would say this. I've asked to see what numbers they can run. We're talking about...

Big Labor got some big love from President Obama and congressional Democrats yesterday after they agreed to exempt union workers from the whopping “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health-care plans until 2018. The sweetheart deal, hammered out behind closed doors, will save union employees at least $60 billion over the years involved, while others won't be as lucky -- they'll have to cough up almost $90 billion. The 40 percent excise tax on what have come to be called "Cadillac" health-care plans would exempt collective-bargaining contracts covering government employees and other union members until Jan. 1, 2018. In another major concession...

The Democrats have made it official, they are the party who picks the needs of the special interests over that of the middle class. Under the deal announced by the AFL-CIO yesterday (neither Congress nor the White House had the guts to announce it first), union members will be exempted from paying the "Cadillac Tax" until 2008. To put it another way, the middle class will be paying taxes to fund the health insurance for union members, and illegal immigrants. The effect of the Cadillac tax that no one in Congress or the mainstream media will talk about is how...

t took two days of wrangling behind closed White House doors under the demanding gaze of big-labor bosses, but President Obama won a major health-care victory yesterday. The same can't be said of America. The deal in a nutshell: a big, fat wet kiss for labor unions, which won exemption from a proposed 40 percent tax on on expansive private health-insurance plans until 2018. Meanwhile, those with generous plans that are not the product of collective-bargaining agreements get to pay beginning immediately. And to pay and pay and pay. The tax (along with deep cuts in Medicare funding) was meant...

Having just caved to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and unions on the Cadillac tax, President Obama loaded on the praise. At a pep rally for Democrats in the Capitol, Obama said, "I hope you don't mind me singling out one of the best partners any President could ever have, and that is your unbelievable Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi." Obama promised Democrats facing a potentially suicidal vote that, "The American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like and doesn't do things that people have been trying to say it does. Their worst fears will prove...

The nation’s labor unions have reportedly cut a deal with House Democrats: Labor will drop its opposition to the so-called Cadillac tax — an excise tax on high-cost employer-provided health-care plans — if Congress will carve out an exemption for plans provided under collective-bargaining agreements. Even after all the unsavory bargains and rotten deals that have characterized the rush to get this thing passed (the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Cornhusker Kickback,” etc.) the “Labor Loophole” surely takes the prize. A few Democrats in the Senate already tried this trick and were laughed out of the smoke-filled room, so nakedly obvious was...

This is a red herring. The solution to the "logjam" was already floated last summer when the Senate was debating the Baucus bill. Union members and their families who receive healthcare benefits paid for by their employers would be exempted from a new tax on healthcare under one option being proposed by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt), according to a report by the Fox Business Channel’s Peter Barnes. Baucus’s plan would tax health care benefits to raise from $161.9 billion to $418 billion over ten years to fund the nationalized “government provider” of health care benefits President Obama and Democrats want....

Jon Gruber, a prominent MIT economist has been been one of the country's leading advocates of Democratic health care reform legislation. Most recently he wrote an editorial for the Washington Post in support of the Cadillac Tax As we prepare for the final round of debate over health reform, perhaps the most contentious issue will be financing...So in the end, we have a policy that provides the necessary financing to pay for subsidies to low-income families; induces employers to buy more cost-effective health insurance, lowering U.S. health-care spending; offsets a bias in our tax system that favors more expensive insurance;...

In the end, nothing hurt George HW Bush's chances for re-election than the rallying cry he made during his acceptance speech at is first nomination convention. And I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent now says he'll raise them as a last resort, or a third resort. But when a politician talks like that, you know that's one resort he'll be checking into. My opponent, my opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll...

As Barack Obama's no-new-taxes health-care reform gets ready to raise your taxes through the roof, there is one tax that is particularly galling that I'd like to talk about. It's the 40-percent surtax on so-called Cadillac health-insurance plans. Never in my life have I seen a stupider idea, or a more blatant money grab. It is shallow, evil and just-plain confiscatory. All the more astounding is that Barack Obama is doing it primarily to the people who got him elected. He would be a nobody without union and government workers, and this tax would overwhelmingly hit union and government workers....

A major component of the Senate Obamacare bill is the 40% tax on "Cadillac" health plans. The bill defines Cadillac plans as any health insurance policy costing more than $8,500 (for an individual) and $23,000 (for a family). The contention is that the tax is the element of the plan that will "bend the cost curve downward" A Dec. 22 Washington Post editorial praised the Cadillac tax as "an essential element of the package." Political reported that a letter to the White House signed by 23 distinguished economists said it is "critical" because it "offers the most promising approach to...

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare [...] would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do. The tax would kick in on plans exceeding...

Sen. Max Baucus's health- care bill poses a nasty ques tion for America's labor unions: Who do they throw under the bus -- their members, or President Obama and their other pals in Washington? The top problem is the "Cadillac tax" -- Baucus' 40 percent tax on high-end insurance policies. As J. Justin Wilson of the Center for Union Facts notes, the tax would slam vast numbers of unionized workers, particularly those in "old-line," AFL-CIO-type unions -- machinists, mechanics, electricians, etc. How can these unions support the Baucus plan? The tax hits especially hard at unionized contract employees -- construction...