If Obamacare were going to be as apocalyptic as the GOP claims (The whole country will be working part-time!), they’d just sit back and wait for that disaster and savor their sweep of both Houses of Congress in 2014 and the White House in 2016.
But, really, they are afraid that people are going to like Obamacare, especially with the subsidies for lower and middle-income families. They are outraged about these “government subsidies.”
But what do they think the government is already doing with health care? Health care subsidies are the biggest tax expenditure in the tax code, costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
If you get health insurance from your employer, you don’t pay taxes on the value of that benefit, it’s not counted as part of your income. Your employer, in turn, gets to deduct all those health insurance premiums as a business expense.
So our current employer-based health system is already heavily subsidized by the federal government. And by the way, one of the reasons wages have stagnated is the growing cost of health insurance. Your employer is paying you more, he’s just doing it by paying those increased premiums for you.
So for the GOP to decry that the government is suddenly subsidizing health insurance is specious. It’s been going on for decades. Big time.
The GOP claims they want consumer-based health care. Well, this is it. Every time someone buys insurance on the new exchanges from a private insurance company, that’s consumer-based health care.
Embattled Farmers 