This is great news. The very existence of employer based plans it one of the main drivers of runaway costs in the healthcare industry. Ron Paul feels health insurance, private and government, is the single most important factor in destroying the doctor patient relationship.
"In the 1970s, many economists such as Martin Feldstein of Harvard became concerned that the unlimited exclusion for health insurance was causing workers to demand excessive health benefits. Instead of providing protection for unforeseen events, analogous to fires in the case of homeowners’ insurance or accidents in the case of auto insurance, health insurance covered normal doctors’ visits, drugs and other predictable medical expenses.
In effect, people were paying for ordinary consumption with before-tax dollars. It was as if one’s auto insurance covered not only accidents but routine maintenance and gasoline as well.
Economists contended that overbuying health insurance fueled medical cost inflation, which raised health insurance premiums, which drove up the cost of employee compensation while pushing down cash wages.
In 1985, the Reagan administration proposed requiring workers to
pay taxes on some health insurance benefits as part of tax reform. But the idea went nowhere in Congress.
In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, put forward
an intriguing proposal to abolish the exclusion for health insurance and use the revenue to finance a $5,000 tax credit for families to buy their own health insurance."
Bruce Bartlett
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...nsurance/?_r=0
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Our company is dropping our group health plan
