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Some win, some lose in Bush's health-care proposal
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Contributor | Servo |
Last Edited | Servo Jan 25, 2007 10:31am |
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Category | Analysis |
Media | Newspaper - Seattle Times |
News Date | Thursday, January 25, 2007 04:30:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description | Economists are still sorting out the implications of the broad health-care proposals President Bush unveiled Tuesday, but already some clear winners and losers are emerging.
Families with generous employer-sponsored coverage would be worse off, while those who buy insurance on the individual market, or whose health plan costs less than $15,000 annually, would come out ahead.
Moreover, while Bush's plan would alter a historic imbalance in the tax code that favors generally better-off consumers who get insurance through their jobs, it could undermine coverage for some sicker, older people and erode the employer-sponsored system that provides coverage to more than half of all Americans.
Some experts questioned whether the plan would help hold down spiraling health-care costs or extend health coverage to some of the 47 million people in the United States who have none.
"It's not solving the uninsured problem and it's not solving the cost problem, so it's not really advancing what we need to have happen," said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health-policy research organization. "What it does is favor individual insurance. ... The question is, should you try to undermine employer coverage? Employer coverage has lower administrative costs, and it covers everybody in a firm." |
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