Who Would Pay the Kerry-Baucus-Obama Tax on Insurance?
James C. Capretta
Mr. Capretta is also a Fellow in the Economics and Ethics Program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an Adjunct Fellow with the Global Aging Initiative of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an Adjunct Fellow with Hudson Institute. Mr. Capretta served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University in 2006 and was a Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in 2005-2006.
From January 2001 to May 2004, Mr. Capretta served as the Bush Administration's top budget official for health care, Social Security and pensions, education, and labor policy. He was the lead official in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for all aspects of Medicare and Medicaid reform policy development and implementation as well as for the development of the President's other important domestic policy initiatives in education and labor.
From June 2004 to August 2006, Mr. Capretta was a Managing Director of Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates, where he performed a wide range of consulting and advocacy services for clients.
Prior to joining the White House in 2001, Mr. Capretta served for nearly a decade as a Senior Policy Analyst on the Republican Staff for the U.S. Senate Budget Committee under Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), handling health care and Social Security issues, and as a Professional Staff Member of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health.
Mr. Capretta began his career as a budget examiner at OMB from 1987 to 1990 after graduating with an MA in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1985, receiving a BA in Government.
The desperate search continues.
Shortly after the July 4th congressional recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid effectively killed the idea of placing a cap on the amount of employer-paid premiums that can be paid on behalf of a worker and still remain tax free. Unions have always been vehemently opposed to any limitation on the tax-preferred status of job-based plans, and imposition of a dollar cap on tax free employer-paid premiums would also have violated President Obama’s already shaky promise (see the House-passed “cap and tax” bill) to not raise taxes on households with incomes below $250,000 per year.
Senator Reid’s firm opposition sent Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus back to the drawing board. He had been counting on the $320 billion raised over a decade from the “tax cap” idea to partially pay for his reform plan. He has now spent the better part of two weeks rummaging around for ideas that can plug the $300 billion hole in a politically safe way that also unites all Democrats on the committee and a Republican or two. Let’s just say it’s not likely to be a very long list.
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf complicated matters further with his assessment of the bills under consideration in the House and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Elmendorf told the Senate Budget Committee last week that these bills don’t go nearly far enough to change the financial incentives which are driving up costs. He also noted that an important way to emphasize cost control would be to put into the bills a limitation on the tax-preferred status of expensive job-based plans — exactly the idea which Senator Reid had rejected only days before. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the one reform with the most potential to instill some much-needed financial discipline into the health sector without overbearing governmental regulation is also the one change senior congressional Democrats most vigorously oppose.
Which brings us to the idea du jour. In private negotiating sessions taking place in the Finance Committee, Senator John Kerry has apparently floated an alternative taxation idea. Why not tax the insurance companies which are selling expensive policies instead of taxing the job-based benefits of workers?
Sounds great, right? A tax on for-profit health insurers. Really, what’s not to like?
As is often the case in Washington, this is not a new idea either. It was proposed by Senator Bill Bradley during the debate on the Clinton health care plan in 1994 for the very same reasons it is being considered today. It has superficial political appeal — for a day or two. No one likes insurers anyway. Perhaps unions and the broader public can go along with a tax that seemingly hits distant and despised companies and not them. And maybe the CBO Director will look as favorably on this kind of tax in terms of potential cost-control as he does the traditional “tax cap” idea.
But, of course, the reason why a tax on insurance might actually have a beneficial impact on the pace of rising health care costs is that insurers will never pay it.
For starters, such a tax couldn’t be structured to apply only to insurance companies. Many employers, especially large ones, self-insure rather than purchase insurance for their workers directly from other companies. To raise any significant revenue at all, and to treat all health insurance equally, the Kerry-Baucus-Obama insurance tax would have to apply to self-insuring employers too. That fact, by itself, is likely to reduce its political appeal in coming days.
Furthermore, no insurer or employer will pay a new tax on insurance and simply reduce their profits by a like amount. If the federal government imposes such a tax, insurers and employers who would otherwise have to pay it will make adjustments to their plans and products to bring costs down and avoid the tax. That’s the point, anyway, even according to the proponents. But that means higher deductibles for the plan’s enrollees. More cost-sharing when patients see their physicians or fill prescriptions. More restrictive networks of preferred providers. There’s no way around the fact that it’s the plan’s enrollees who will pay more, not the insurers or the employers.
Of course, in a competitive labor market, if employers cut their health costs, they can pay their workers more in cash wages, and that’s what CBO is very likely to assume would occur with the Kerry-Baucus-Obama tax. That means a substitution of taxable wages for tax-free fringe benefits. Federal tax collections will indeed go up, but it's workers who will be paying more, even as they get less expansive health insurance. Indeed, there is no way around the fact that any effort to get Americans into less expensive insurance will increase costs for the middle class, and that’s exactly what would happen with this proposal too.
But that won’t stop Senate Democrats from trying to have it both ways. They want CBO to give them credit for adopting incentives for large-scale enrollment in less expensive health insurance, even as they also proclaim that no middle class family will pay more taxes or more for health care either. That contention — that they have somehow found the health-care free lunch — won't stand up to even modest scrutiny. Indeed, that’s why the Bradley tax didn’t break the logjam in 1994. No one was fooled. And they won't be this time either.
On-the-Fly Audacity
Yesterday, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did everyone a favor and spoke some serious truth to power: The health care bills under consideration in Congress will make our long-term budget outlook worse, not better, Elmendorf said, and that would be very bad for our economic future.
Elmendorf’s assessment, welcome as it certainly was, shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone, especially the Democratic authors of the bills now under consideration. They more than anyone else should know that the bills moving through their committees would add massive new entitlement spending to the federal budget while making only the most marginal of changes to the prevailing financial incentives which are pushing costs up rapidly every year. What did they think Elmendorf would say?
Still, Elmendorf’s assessment seems to have caught some Democrats by surprise, starting with the president. Just days earlier he told a gathering of skeptical Blue Dog Democrats that they should get behind the House bill because it would deliver savings beyond the ten-year window. That wasn’t a credible assertion even then (see this post from Tuesday), but, in the wake of Elmendorf’s testimony, it really has no standing.
So what’s the administration next move? Desperate times apparently call for some serious audacity.
Today, the Obama administration delivered one of the more remarkable presidential power grabs seen in recent memory (the transmittal letter is here, and a section-by-section description of the proposal is available here).
The president has decided — just days before the deadline he himself set for passage of health care bills in both chambers of Congress — that he wants to create a new and very powerful executive branch agency, the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), which would be accountable only to him and have the authority to re-write the Medicare program from top to bottom by executive memo. Now that’s audacious.
The council would be made up of five members, all selected by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The president could fire any one of them for cause. They would have two jobs. First, each year, the council would make recommendations to the president regarding inflation updates to Medicare’s payment rates for hospitals, doctors, and other suppliers of services. Those recommendations, if approved by the president, would automatically go into effect in thirty days unless Congress passed a resolution disapproving them — which the president would also have to sign into law. Of course, if the president approved the council’s original package of recommendations, it is unlikely he would sign a congressional disapproval resolution overturning them. So, as a practical matter, the proposal would force Congress to find a two-thirds supermajority to stop presidentially-approved IMAC recommendations from going into effect.
That would be a remarkable shift of power on its own, but the president’s proposal doesn’t stop there. Not only would the council make recommendations on payment updates, it would also have the authority to propose other “Medicare reforms” which would go into effect unless Congress could muster veto override majorities in opposition. What are “Medicare reforms”? From the write-up, it seems they could be just about anything. Changes in beneficiary cost-sharing. New rules for establishing qualified hospitals and doctors. Penalties for physicians who don’t follow government guidelines. Pretty much anything except for the payroll tax and premium structure. The only parameters are that the “reforms” must improve the quality of medical care and the efficiency of Medicare operations.
The administration is touting this as a belated cost-control idea. It’s not. By itself, it doesn’t change anything, as there are no hard targets that must be hit. So it doesn’t answer the Elmendorf critique that the bills now moving in Congress, even if such a provision were added to them, don’t bend the cost-curve of governmental health spending.
Still, the fact that the administration is pushing this bill at all speaks volumes. Here’s a Democratic president telling a Democratic Congress that it can’t be trusted to run Medicare anymore. That’s stunning, especially so because Democrats, including the president, are working feverishly to exert additional governmental control over health insurance for working age Americans. If Congress can’t run Medicare well, what possible rationale is there for standing up another government-run insurance plan?
Nonetheless, the audacity is something to behold. Certainly unilateral executive branch authority to re-write entitlement programs from scratch would have come in awful handy during the Reagan and Bush years. But that may dawn on others as well. Like Medicare beneficiaries, physicians, hospitals, labs, nursing homes, and, of course, House and Senate members too. Good luck, Mr. President.
The President’s Reckless and False Health Care Claim
It’s now a clear pattern. When the president senses his position is vulnerable to a factual criticism, he asserts emphatically that the opposite is true — without ever providing evidence to back up his claim.
Here’s the latest example. According to Politico, President Obama told skeptical Blue Dog Democrats last evening that they should support the health care bill emerging in the House because it would produce savings beyond the ten-year budget window.
Oh really. Says who?
The context here is crucial. It’s already abundantly clear that the federal government cannot afford its existing health care commitments. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently projected that Medicare and Medicaid costs will nearly double in twenty-five years, from 5.3 percent of GDP today to 10.0 percent in 2035 (this assumes continuation of current policy with regard to physician fee updates). The Medicare Trustees projected in May that the program’s 75-year unfunded liability has reached $36 trillion.
Moreover, the federal government is projected to run massive budget deficits for the foreseeable future. In 2009, the government has already run up a deficit of $1 trillion through June, and it could reach $2 trillion before it’s over at the end of September. CBO expects the Obama budget plan would increase the government’s debt by $11 trillion from the end of 2008 to the end of 2019. Running up government debt at that kind of pace would put the nation’s economy at considerable risk, to put it mildly. At some point, lenders would demand higher returns for their lending, pushing interest rates up and choking off growth, or the Fed would partially monetize the debt with even easier money and rapid inflation.
It is in this context that Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are trying to rush health care bills to their respective floors for consideration before the August congressional break.
The centerpieces of the bills are the creation of a new, massive entitlement to health insurance subsidization and a large expansion in Medicaid eligibility. The House bill, unveiled today and available here, would add $1.2 trillion in federal costs over a decade with just these two expansions, according to CBO. And the trend is even more alarming. Between 2018 and 2019, federal costs for the new entitlement and the enlargement of Medicaid would increase by a combined 8.9 percent.
That shouldn’t be surprising though, because that’s basically the rate at which Medicare and Medicaid have been growing for more than four decades. And there’s nothing in the House or Senate health care bills which would lead one to assume a new health entitlement program will grow at a more moderate pace in the future than the ones already on the books have done in the past. CBO has said repeatedly that slowing the pace of rising costs will require a fundamental restructuring of financial incentives, for consumers and suppliers of medical services. Nothing currently on the table in Congress comes close to meeting that test.
That was essentially the message CBO delivered to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee last week. In response to a question from Sen. Judd Gregg, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said a bill which simply expanded coverage without fundamental reform “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path” (Elmendorf’s testimony can be seen here, with his response to Senator Gregg at the 1 hour, 38 minute mark).
Moreover, it seems that President Obama’s own budget director agrees with CBO. Last week, Peter Orszag delivered a letter to House leaders saying their bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to slow the pace of rising costs. But even that didn’t stop the president from saying otherwise in his desperate attempt to round up votes.
The federal government’s budget is already knee-deep in debt, largely because politicians have promised that better days ahead will make all budgetary problems go away. They haven’t, and the current president is making the situation much worse. The last thing any member of Congress should do is simply take the president’s word for it that the health care bills under consideration will ultimately “bend the cost-curve.” If he really believes that — because no one else really does — he should provide some hard evidence to back up his claim. And that’s not a theoretical possibility. He could ask his independent projection experts — not his political appointees — to provide directly to Congress and the public, without review by anyone else, their best estimates of what these bills would do to the long-term (25- or 50-year) budget outlook. Those estimates would be taken much more seriously than unsubstantiated assertions which run against commonsense and all evidence.
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