By now most of you know that a new report by the insurance industry claiming the Baucus “Bill” could raise a typical middle class family’s insurance premium by $4000 has the Democrats furious and scrambling to reply.
In fact, the Baucus backers seem to be in such a tizzy that some of them are unwittingly undermining their previous, well-scripted arguments. Consider, for example, the following (from the Associated Press article linked above):
The PricewaterhouseCoopers study also assumes that proposed taxes on high-cost insurance, new levies on insurers and other health industry firms, and Medicare cuts will be directly passed on to privately insured policyholders.
Critics of the study said it tilted those assumptions too far toward a worst case, ignoring the bill’s potential to curb costs.
For example, the tax on high-cost health insurance that Baucus is proposing could lead employers and individuals to switch to lower-cost plans and avoid the levy. If that happens, there would be no additional costs to pass on to consumers.
The study “assumed the tax would have no behavioral effect, contrary to every other tax in the history of civilization,” said economist Len Nichols of the nonpartisan New America Foundation.
Now let’s leave aside the fact that the New America Foundation is “nonpartisan” in the same sense that, say, the Nobel Prize Committee or the New York Times is nonpartisan. What is striking here is that this criticism of the insurance industry report inadvertenly confirms what health “reform” critics have been saying all along: that President Obama is being duplicitous, deceitful, or dishonest (or, to give him the benefit of any doubt some credulous person may have, disingenuous) when he says that his “plan” would allow everyone who likes their current insurance to keep it.
Apparently in the president’s mind “everyone” does not include all those people who have good employer-provided plans, since it is those good plans that will be dropped to avoid the “Cadillac” tax.
