MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber recently wrote in the Washington Post in support of the Senate proposal to enact an excise tax on “Cadillac” health care plans, a “40 percent assessment on insurance plans with premiums of more than $8,500 for singles and $23,000 for families. In the House, the gap is closed with a surtax on those earning more than $500,000.” He argues that the tax works because it bends the curve, is eminently progressive, and because it corrects an existing tax bias.
The assessment proposed in the Senate is not a new tax; it is the elimination of an existing tax break that is provided to exactly these firms. Under current law, if workers are paid in wages, they are taxed on those wages. But if they receive the same amount of compensation in the form of health insurance, they are not taxed. As a result, the tax code has for years provided a large subsidy to the most expensive health plans — at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of more than $250 billion a year. To put this in proportion, the cost of this tax subsidy to employer-sponsored insurance is more than twice what it will cost to provide universal health coverage to our citizens.
I completely agree that the Cadillac tax will, as Gruber predicts, “bend the curve” and change the incentive structure for employers. As he writes, “it would reduce the incentives for employers to provide excessively generous insurance, leading to more cost-conscious use of health care and, ultimately, lower spending.”
For that exact reason, taxing health benefits seems counterproductive. I think what will likely happen is the market will reconfigure, as Gruber says, and companies will start offering fewer ‘Cadillac’ health plans. The reason they offered them in the first place was that it was the cheapest way of differentiating benefits with other firms since the plans aren’t taxed and taken, as I understand it, out of gross earnings instead of net profit. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term way of funding public health programs or rebates because if behavior actually changes (as is the goal of any excise tax), then the funding source dries up.
It’s sort of odd that the CBO doesn’t seem to be taking this into account very much. The CBO estimates that revenue from the excise tax will go up every year that it’s collected, from $7 billion in 2013, $13 billion in 2014, all the way to $35 billion in 2019. The numbers should naturally go up as health care becomes more expensive, and with inflation, but there’s no evidence that there is accounting for a reverse effect when employers decide they no longer want to pay the excise tax (at least the CBO isn’t explicit about it, and I guess technically the rate of increase is slowing). Why aren’t the numbers going down every year as businesses stop providing, as Gruber predicts, excessively expensive health care plans? Why would any business keep the Cadillac plans once they are being taxed on it (and which are less visible as a benefit), and not just divert the difference to increased salaries?
I started writing this before the recent “accord” in which America’s future is sold out once again to labor unions. Labor unions, which negotiate these excessively expensive health care plans, would be exempted from paying the new tax for 5 years. According to the unions (not even the CBO), this would reduce the revenue of this tax by 40 percent, to $90 billion from $149 billion over ten years. I suspect the true reduction is a lot more. Let’s also keep in mind that while the unions are scheduled to start paying the tax in five years, reasonable people suspect that the Democrats will cave in again and give the unions another exemption when the time comes. As in their analysis for the rest of the health care bill, the CBO must assume Congress will actually keep its word and start charging unions in 5 years, so we can be sure that whatever the new cost estimate is, it will be far less than the true cost to America. If Gruber thinks that it’s unfair that businesses basically steal billions from the taxpayers every year through their lavish tax breaks, he (and the voting public) should be just as incensed now that the unions, like the Nebraskans, are getting special benefits at the cost of the American taxpayer.
What’s deceptive is that the Cadillac tax in the Senate bill gets a lot of press, but it represents only about 15% of the estimated offsets from revenue expansions and spending cuts that will keep the spending bill in the black. If the tax is as good as affecting behavior as other excise taxes, and Congress caves in as easily to other special interests as it did to unions, I foresee little long-term “deficit reduction” or “deficit neutrality” from health care reform. The real key to offsets is not reducing overspending by businesses, but by (get this) government-run healthcare plans. Just as Congress has waived “automatic” cuts in Medicare (provided by the Sustainable Growth Rate formula) each year since 2003, politicians in Congress will indubitably start waiving the Medicare spending cuts that make up about 50% of the offsets in the Senate bill as soon as the AMA and AARP start clamoring. And what about after 2019? Are there still going to be Cadillac taxes, or billions more that can be cut from Medicare to keep financing increasingly expensive subsidies?
Deficit neutrality is a pipe dream that’s used to sell gullible voters on the health care bill. Federal savings are fungible, and we could be saving money on Medicare cuts or excise taxes even without adding billions in subsidies for health insurance. It’s time for people to face the truth. If we want universal health care in America, or anything close, we need to be willing to pay for it.
p.s.
One final word is that I’d encourage people to actually read the CBO reports on the House and Senate bills, rather than getting all of their information filtered by the press. Check out this proposed spending cut in the Senate bill, that I bet you never read in the NYTimes:
“Reducing Medicaid and Medicare payments to hospitals that serve a large number of low-income patients, known as disproportionate share (DSH) hospitals, by about $43 billion—composed of roughly $22 billion from Medicaid and $21 billion from Medicare DSH payments.”
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