MaxTax: Working Thread
Fatster found Max Baucus’ health care plan here. Use this thread to post what you find.
I’m about 1/10 of the way through. My favorite detail so far is that the Health Exchanges would take your MaxTax–your mandated payment to shitty insurance companies–as a payroll deduction.
For employed individuals who purchase health insurance through a state exchange, the premium payments would be made through payroll deductions.
This really is a tax to benefit Baucus’ donors.
This is interesting:
Individuals between 300-400 percent of FPL would be eligible for a premium credit based on capping an individual‘s share of the premium at a flat 13 percent of income. For purposes of calculating household size, illegal immigrants will not be included in FPL. Liability for premiums would be capped at 13 percent of income for the purchase of a silver plan. The share of premium enrollees pay would be held constant over time. The premium credit amount would be tied to the second lowest-cost silver plan in the area where the individual resides (by age according to standard age factors defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) plan.
This is the cap for premiums for some middle class people, remember. What I’m interested in is that they cap the subsidy to the second lowest-cost plan that qualifies for subsidies. The insurance companies will be gaming that system, to direct consumers into precisely what model they want to pay for, because they know that strapped middle class families will only get what they can get a full subsidy for.
I’m on page 21 now, and already there have been 3 discussions of how to make sure undocumented workers (Baucus calls them illegals) will be prevented from buying into insurance in this program. They may have reprimanded Joe Wilson, but they sure kowtowed to him.
Here’s another way Baucus is incenting employers to pay their employees shit wages:
A qualified small employer for this purpose generally would be an employer with no more than 25 fulltime equivalent employees (FTEs) employed during the employer‘s taxable year, and whose employees have annual fulltime equivalent wages that average no more than $40,000. However, the full amount of the credit would be available only to an employer with ten or fewer FTEs and whose employees have average annual fulltime equivalent wages from the employer of less than $20,000.
McJobs: It’s not just for WalMart anymore.
There’s a whole bunch of language making sure Read more →