As posted Sunday, the obvious had escaped Reps. Waxman [D. CA] and Stupak [D. MI] regarding the cost implications of the health care legislation recently passed without much reading.
As CNN reports online:
Dead $14 billion loophole could sink corporate health careThe "ooops" just getting louder. Ooops because tax laws incentivize the wrong actions and ooops because once they get ingrained, the corrective action is very costly.(Fortune) -- With President Obama still glowing over last week's passage of health-care reform, it's a good time to ask why American businesses ever began providing health-care coverage, and especially prescription drug benefits, to begin with. Out of all industrialized nations, only the United States has tied employment to health care and retirement coverage.Incredibly, our health-care system is an outgrowth of 1950s union-busting efforts. That's right: Carmakers didn't want unions to form their own benefits co-ops. So they instead provided the very health care and retiree coverage that ended up destroying them.
Of course, from the moment health-care benefits became a part of employee compensation, they also became a bargaining chip and a distraction from the work at hand.
There's no better example of this than the complex employer-based prescription drug programs that were created under Medicare Part D, and which is now the cause of so much handwringing and billion dollar write-offs by some of the largest companies in America.
[full story]