Aren't you tired of revisiting coverage for your employees each and every year. How much of your time and money are dedicated to simply trying to find an affordable plan that can cover your employees across the country? What does this cost you and your company on a monthly basis?
There is a simple answer that would reduce your sever headache and help your human resource department concentrate on productivity matters. Medicare for all. Just pay a small medicare tax increase and you and your employees will be able to simply and efficiently cover 80% of all your medical costs. There would still be an opportunity to insure the remaining 20% through medicare wrap around coverage that each individual would be able to acquire on the open market.
How much was that rate increase this year? What percentage of payroll did you pay? Will you have enough money to hire anyone else as the economy recovers?
They are eating your lunch, sir.
Sincerely,
java
Why So Scared of a Public Plan?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090610_why_so_scared_of_a_public_plan/
Posted on Jun 11, 2009
By Joe Conason
Within the coming weeks, Americans will begin to consider critical issues concerning the future of health care for themselves and their children, including universal coverage, taxation of benefits, computerized records and the controlling of costs. But before the debate commences in Congress and the media, big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.
After decades of denigrating government—and worshiping corporations—the idea that a public program might work as well or better than a corporate provider may well sound counter intuitive to many Americans. How can government, which is so widely believed to do nothing well while wasting enormous sums, possibly be expected to outperform the highly efficient, supremely managed and profitably motivated corporate sector? Wouldn’t we be better off if we simply entrust the provision of health care to the insurance industry? How can we trust those Washington bureaucrats with our health?
Actually, many consumers have learned by now that those questions are misleading at best. They know, for instance, that trusting a health insurance company is likely to be an expensive mistake. They know, too, that corporate bureaucrats can be even more ruthless in denying help to a beleaguered individual or family than those who work in government.
Studies have repeatedly shown that patient satisfaction with Medicare, the quintessential public insurance plan, is considerably higher than with private insurers among comparable age groups. And consumers understand that the drive for profits often conflicts with patient care, leading them to the conclusion that insurance and pharmaceutical corporations are excessively powerful and socially irresponsible.
According to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the people who respond to his surveys despise “insurer greed,” and are disturbed by their profitability, lack of accessibility, lack of accountability and excess of bureaucracy. There is “no love lost” between Americans and the private health insurers, he warned Republican congressional leaders as they considered how to oppose reform.
But the same arguments that have distorted the debate over health care will emerge again—especially the claim that private insurance is somehow more efficient than a public program would be, or that we cannot “afford” a public plan.
The opposite is true, as surprising as that may seem. During the decade that ended in 2006, to cite just one set of relevant statistics, the level of health spending per head (for similar benefits) grew 4.6 percent annually under Medicare, while spending under private health insurance rose by 7.3 percent. For many years, in fact, Medicare has performed better at controlling costs than private insurance companies.
One reason is simple and obvious: Eliminating profits for shareholders and management cuts out a major cost factor.
Another is less obvious: Private insurers consistently spend more on overhead and administration than Medicare. To anyone who shares the broad prejudice against government, the difference will be startling, although these numbers are very well known to health experts. The average overhead cost of Medicare is roughly 2 or 3 percent, far below the administrative costs of private insurers, which range between 27 and 40 percent.
These basic facts have broad implications for the nation’s capacity to ensure quality health coverage for all of its citizens. Private insurance has strengths as well as weaknesses, but there is no doubt that a new public plan, alongside Medicare, would become an essential yardstick—as the old New Dealers used to say—by which to measure the progress and efficiency of the private sector.
The private insurers will complain that this is “unfair” competition, but if the private sector is truly the efficient solution to our costly, wasteful and unfair health care system, then why is it so frightened of a public plan?
Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.Question
Question: Is there a cap to paying FICA? I was told by an accountant that after you've earned a certain amount (I believe he said $103,000.00) and they have held out the proper amount each weekly payroll check that the amount that is held out lessens.
Submitted: 333 days and 1 hours ago.
Category: Tax
Value: $15
Status: CLOSED
Accepted Answer
FICA taxes cover both social security and medicare. The social security tax is 6.2% and the medicare tax is 1.45%.
The medicare tax is assessed on all of your income, no matter how much you make in a year. The social security tax stops once your income reaches a certain level. For the 2008 tax year that level was $102,000. For the 2009 tax year, the level is $106,800.
Once you have reached the level in each respective tax year, then the social security tax should stop being withheld and the only tax that continues to be withheld is medicare at a rate of 1.45%.
If this was helpful please press the Accept button. Positive feedback is also appreciated.
Thank you.
Expert: Merlo
Pos. Feedback: 99.9 %
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Answered: 3/28/2009
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Report: Early CBO Estimate Says Public Option Will Save Billions Over 10 Years
Jon Cohn over at The New Republic is reporting that, in early estimates, the Congressional Budget Office is finding that a robust public option, along the lines of the one recommended in the House health care bill, could save about $150 billion over 10 years--a notable chunk of the approximately $1 trillion Congress will need to finance an overhaul package.
Keep in mind, though, that the public option creates savings by driving down prices, and it can't do that nearly as effectively if it's prevented from setting below-market pay rates. But that's exactly what conservative Democrats are trying to do. At the same time, those Democrats are demanding that health care legislation do a better job of lowering health care costs. And that's just one of the contradictions inherent to the position of those attempting to scale back reform efforts.Boost for Baucus on cost of health reform
By Edward Luce in Washington
Published: October 7 2009 23:55 | Last updated: October 7 2009 23:55
Max Baucus, the centrist Democratic senator, got a boost from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday night when it estimated his healthcare reform plan would cost $829bn over the next decade – well within the Obama administration’s upper ceiling.
The release of the CBO estimates, which also projects that the bill would reduce the overall fiscal deficit by $81bn over the next decade, means the focus now switches to the critical vote of the Senate finance committee.
Once it passes out of committee, the bill would move to its end-game stage on the Senate floor after having been merged with the more liberal version passed by the Senate health committee earlier this year. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is expected to take about a week to merge the two versions.
But there is still uncertainty over how long Mr Baucus will take to pass it out of his committee. “Right now no-one is sure whether Senator Baucus has the votes to pass it,” said a staff member for another Democratic senator. “Obviously, he won’t push it to a vote until he is sure it will pass.”
A spokesman for Mr Baucus said he had not yet decided when to schedule a vote. The uncertainty revolves principally around four senators in a committee that splits 13-10 between Democrats and Republicans. Of the Republicans, only one, Olympia Snowe of Maine, is considering a possible vote in favour of the bill. Her vote would be symbolically important to the White House, which has long pushed for bipartisan support.
More troublesome for Mr Baucus, who has come under strong fire from the left for jettisoning the “public option”, or government insurance plan, in favour of a more diluted system of public cooperatives, are the still-undecided votes of Jay Rockefeller and Ron Wyden, more liberal Democratic senators from West Virginia and Oregon, respectively.
Mr Rockefeller tried and failed to get the bill amended to include the public option. Mr Wyden is thought to be upset that his alternative healthcare reform bill received scant consideration from Mr Baucus. In addition, there is uncertainty whether Ben Nelson, the centrist Democrat from Nebraska, would support a bill that administers cuts to providers of Medicare, the healthcare programme for US retirees.
On Wednesday, Mr Baucus trumpeted the CBO numbers, which also project that it would reduce the overall US fiscal deficit by between a quarter and a half a percentage point of gross domestic product in its second decade. “Health reform should be fiscally responsible as it expands and improves coverage and these [CBO] numbers reiterate that real reform can be just that,” said Mr Baucus.
Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard University and the nation’s leading healthcare pollster, said it was very hard to predict where public opinion would settle on the emerging Senate plan. “Just because the bill is centrist doesn’t mean it will be popular,” he said. “Families will be looking very closely to see how it specifically affects each of them.”
