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Tag: tax treatment of health insurance

Newsletters

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.
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August 28, 2009
Sen. Kennedy was both respected and liked by colleagues on both sides of the aisle during his remarkable 47 years in the Senate. While he always was firm in his liberal views and we seldom agreed with him, Sen. Kennedy did listen to his Republican colleagues and worked to forge compromises. That bipartisan spirit has been markedly missing during his absence from the Senate this year. The health reform legislation making its way through Congress is rigid and aggressively liberal, without any evidence of bipartisanship, and it is rightly facing a firestorm of opposition.




July 9, 2009
White House and congressional leaders continue to work feverishly on a sweeping overhaul of one-sixth of our economy, but their efforts hit a number of road blocks this week, putting their rapid timetable and even passage of major health reform legislation in jeopardy. The week started with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel signaling that President Obama would be willing to negotiate over creation of a government-run health insurance plan. Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet the president's goals would be to have a public plan as a fallback if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own.



June 12, 2009
The first Democratic bill in the hopper this week came from Sen. Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, taking 615-pages to turn most of whatever is left of our private health sector over to government. The normally-genteel Sen. Orrin Hatch was quoted in The New York Times this morning as calling the bill "the most liberal bunch of gobbledygook I've seen in my life -- a complete liberal mishmash of ideas." Keith Hennessey, director of the National Economic Council under President Bush, was the first to present a detailed analysis, which you can find here.



May 22, 2009
Four Republican members of Congress shook up the health reform debate this week when they were the first to reach the floor of the House and Senate with comprehensive health reform legislation. The Patients' Choice Act puts the $300-billion tax break for employment-based health insurance front and center in the debate. Reps. Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes and Sens. Tom Coburn and Richard Burr use it to create generous refundable tax credits for Americans to buy health insurance ($2,300 for individuals and $5,700 for families).







March 27, 2009
So much is happening on the health reform front in Washington this week that our heads are spinning, with legislators jockeying for control over procedures, timing, and the content of reform legislation. A number of key provisions in the legislation are clear. The White House and leaders in Congress want to create a new government health insurance plan. They want to impose a mandate that employers pay for health insurance for their workers.They want to create a new National Health Insurance Exchange as a vehicle for strict federal regulation of private health insurance and for distribution of new subsidies for individuals and businesses. They want to expand access to existing price-controlled government health programs. And they may impose a mandate that all individuals have health insurance.

 




March 13, 2009
"So many lessons, so little time." That was how Brian Lee Crowley of Canada led off his remarks at our major conference, "Lessons from abroad for health reform in the U.S." on Monday, co-sponsored by the Galen Institute and the International Policy Network in London. The presentations by noted experts from Canada, the U.K., and Europe were splendid and offered a sober warning to U.S. policymakers about embarking on a path toward giving government more power and control over health care and health coverage.



December 19, 2008
All roads to new legislation in Washington run through the Congressional Budget Office, and the CBO yesterday offered health policy makers a menu of 115 choices of reform initiatives, with price tags attached. It's like a shopping list for policy makers, who, using our money, will mix and match ideas and offer new ones of their own.




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