Harvard: taxing job-based health benefits would hit working families hardest

"The study, titled “The regressivity of taxing employer-paid health insurance,” appears in the August 19 online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was written by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, professors at Harvard Medical School and primary care doctors at Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts.
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The authors note that the tax rate would drop even lower for the super-rich. “A Goldman Sachs executive who enjoyed the firm’s infamous $40,543 health plan got a federal tax subsidy of about $15,367 last year,” they write. “But that’s only 0.13 percent of the bonuses received by the company’s four top earners. So though taxing health benefits would spare the uninsured, the average poor family with employer-paid coverage would be taxed at a rate 140 times higher than Wall Street titans.”

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/august/new_harvard_study_re.php

via http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/08/20-2

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Is there anything our government does that isn't a scam to further enrich the already rich on the backs of working folks?

Medicare for All.

it could in theory go as low as $20,000 but the talk has been by the senate $40,000. That is $40,000 payed for your health care by your employer - not your wages.

However, that would be displaced or offset by no-more insurance company payments, and all the evidence seems to point to it costing less, IN TOTAL, than our current system.

it doesn't look like they're considering any poverty threshold below which care is provided at no charge. But even if there was one at and below X income level, the regressive curve the Harvard MDs or authors document would still seem to remain above that X point.