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Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) (AP)
Most middle-class families will still struggle to pay for health insurance under the Senate Finance Committee bill; which contains an individual mandate to get insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it themselves.
If that wasn't bad enough, as I've been mentioning; tax credits to help with premiums won't go far enough for everyone.
These families purchasing their own coverage through new insurance exchanges will simply be unable to afford it. There are, thankfully, a few Senators that see this. "For some people it's going to be a heavy lift, we're doing our best to make sure it's not an impossible lift." - Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
"We have no certainty as to whether or not these plans are going to be affordable." - Sen. Olympia Snowe, (R-ME) Both are on the Senate Finance Committee, which finished writing a health care bill on Friday. However, in a case that can be used as the definition of hypocrisy, both voted against the Sen. Charles Shumer (D-NY) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) which both contained clear and robust public insurance options.
A new online tool from the Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the predicament. The Health Reform Subsidy Calculator gives families an idea of what households of varying incomes and ages would pay under the different Democratic health care bills. The legislation is still a work in progress and the calculator is only supposed to be used as a guide.
Regardless, the results are both astonishing and sickening at the same time. In one example, a family of four headed by a 45-year-old making $63,000 a year is supposed to be smack dab in the middle of the middle class. That family would pay $7,110 to buy its own health insurance under the Baucus Plan. The family would get a tax credit of $3,970 to help pay for a policy worth $11,080. But the balance due -- $7,110 -- is real money and is about 11% of their total income. That's more than they would spend on food in a year, most likely.
Kaiser's calculator doesn't take into account co-payments and deductibles that could add hundreds of dollars, even several thousand, to a family's total medical expenses. A Congressional Budget Office analysis estimates total expenses could average 20 percent of income for some families by 2016. Clearly, there is a problem. All of this can be directly traced back to the Senate Finance Committee's quixotic quest to cut the overall cost of the health insurance reform legislation. They're cutting subsidies to meet the President's stated cost of $900 billion over 10 years. This, of course, means premiums will be higher than under earlier Democratic proposals.
The trade-off directly affects people who buy their own coverage. For those with job-based insurance, employers would continue to cover most of the costs; although there would be more of those costs. As I previously mentioned; under the Baucus bill, a family of four making $63,000 would have to pay about 11 percent of its income for health insurance, according to Kaiser. One of the other health insurance reform bills which has already passed from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee required the same hypothetical family to pay about 7 percent of its income for premiums or about $2,500 less per year.
They obviously give the most generous subsidies to those at or near the poverty line, about $22,000 for a family of four. That's where the problem is concentrated because about three-fourths of the uninsured are in households making less than twice the poverty level. Read that again. 75%, 3 out of 4 uninsured are in households making less than twice the poverty level.
Put it this way, a single-payer system would not only cover those 75% of uninsured, but would cover middle-class families at a substantially lower cost.
The truly scary part under the Baucus bill is as income rises, the subsidies taper off. For a family of four making $45,000, federal subsidies would cover 71 percent of the premium under the Baucus plan, according to the Kaiser calculator. For a family with an income of $63,000, the subsidies would cover 36 percent of the premium. A family making $90,000 would get no help.
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