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Our newsletter features a commentary by Grace-Marie Turner on the major developments and issues of the week as well as summaries of writings by participants in the Health Policy Consensus Group and other articles of interest from the health policy world, plus announcements of coming events. It is emailed in an HTML format from the galen@galen.org email address, via Constant Contact, and you may have to adjust your email settings and junk mailbox to ensure that you don’t miss an issue.
August 1, 2008
The Senate Finance Committee got to the heart of the issue during a hearing yesterday on "Health Benefits in the Tax Code: The Right Incentives." Three prominent economists were in solidarity in targeting the tax treatment of health insurance as key to health reform. The value of the subsidy for job-based health insurance was a whopping $245 billion in 2007, according to Eward Kleinbard, chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. (This compares to government spending of $372 billion that year for Medicare and $340 billion for Medicaid.)