McCain’s Health Care TAX
Senator John McCain again figures on the lack of sensibility by 51% of the population. He may be right. But we will investigate his Health Care TAX position for laughs.
Suppose you are a young family. The husband makes, say forty thousand dollars a year. The wife also works and makes twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Sixty-five thousand as a household income. Let’s also say that your family includes three children. For the sake of argument we will say that one of the employers offers health insurance at a mere ninety dollars a month on payroll deduction. There are deductibles and coinsurance – but they won’t break the bank. Everyone has adequate health insurance.
The actual insurance cost for a family of five ranges from ten to twelve thousand dollars a year. So the employer is picking up a hefty part of the tab. The value of the sixty-five thousand dollar income, with health care, vacation, sick pay and other benefits is around eighty-thousand dollars. That will get the family into the bottom of middle class.
John McCain proposes taxing the health care premium as income. Then he will give an extra $2,500 deduction for a single person and $5,000 deduction for a family. So the family of five will be taxed on the ten thousand dollar insurance premium benefit and will be given a $5,000 deduction. McCain would have this family pay taxes on the difference – meaning they would be taxed on another $5,000 that they are not presently taxed on.
Let us make another assumption – the family itemizes and deducts their mortgage premium. With their deductions they are in a 10% tax bracket. That means they will pay 10% on the $5,000 difference in final taxable income.
$500 more tax per year for the bottom of the middle class.
Comment by Capt America on 21 September 2008:
Finally, one article on the Fireside-Extreme Left Wing-Post. That I can agree with. Not necessarily because I agree with Obama, but because this article has some truth to it. However, won’t the Obama plan cost the lower middle class tax payer as well? His plan will require employers to mandate health insurance or pay a penalty to the government so it can provide health care. We all know everyone pays out the wazoo for health care. We may end up paying less, but with employers paying more, our wages will decrease, jobs will be doubled-up so that jobs can be cut. More work for less pay. Then you bring in Conventry which is the biggest scam since homemade elixirs of the 1800’s.
Prescription drugs are ridiculously high as well. And when we finally have a drug that helps the majority, Conventry will take it off their list. We end up paying 1-2% of our net pay for prescritptions on top of our 300 dollar a month premiums. Enter Obamas’ health care plan to fight for reducing costs of prescriptions. Apparently according to numerous sources, prescriptions are about as cheap as they can get. If that holds water, then the only way to cut costs is to reduce the amount of high price drugs. So we get less drugs that are substandard.
I’m not buying either parties health care plan.