The Bush healthcare proposals will leave employees worse off.
Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization, said: “The president’s proposal would mean the end of employer-based benefits as we know them. It gives employers a way out of providing the benefits because their employees could get the same tax break on their own.”
Surprise! Actually, not. Like most of the modern conservative movement the White House believes that Americans consume too much health care. Being over insured, people go to the doctor without properly weighing the costs. The solution usually involves some combination of higher copays, increased power for the insurance providers and breaking up group coverage in favor of individual plans. It’s a blighted, Hobbesian view of society that would get an honest candidate slaughtered at the polls, so instead we see plans like this which never seem to work like advertised. Dissembling spokesmen will go on spinning features as bugs, and it will be up to citizens to find out the many legal ways that an individual plan can drop you like a hot potato, never to be insured again, the moment you actually need it.
Anyway that’s the plan. Good for us, and thanks to our newly-socialist Congress, the plan died in utero.