Somewhat surprisingly, the editorialists at the New York Times seem to have joined the “Fix Medicare First” camp:
The administration seems to have scoured the health policy literature for ideas, and its proposals reflect the thinking of the nation’s leading experts. Most of these ideas would first be tried on a small scale in Medicare — to see if they reduced costs while improving or at least maintaining the quality of care — before being adopted on a wide scale in government programs. Ideas that work for Medicare would presumably migrate out to the private sector.
Somewhat less surprisingly the newspaper has also repeated its support for taxing health insurance benefits:
One way to keep deficits in check would be to impose taxes within the health care system instead of more broadly, which should ensure that revenues increase at the rate of health care inflation. A tax on the value of an employer’s contribution to insurance could lead beneficiaries to choose cheaper policies and think twice before undergoing costly tests. We have been leery of recommending a tax that would affect many workers, but a tax on very expensive plans might make sense.
I see no sound reason to tax wages rather than compensation at any level. Treating non-wage compensation differently from wages, particularly in the case of the healthcare benefits of large companies that self-insure, is both a subsidy to the companies and to the over-consumption of healthcare. These subsidies give an advantage to the corporate dinosaurs at the expense of more agile, smaller companies. In recent decades these smaller companies, not coincidentally, have been responsible for much of the job growth in the country and that’s something that will be sorely needed if we’re to see an economic recovery worthy of the name.
One of the fundamental problems with our political system is its predisposition to attempt, futilely, to maintain the status quo rather than embracing change and seeking to manage it. The guys who are already at the top seek to preserve the system that got them there and they’ve got the money, connections, and clout to do it.
