Sep 5, 2007 
Tony Snow is, by all accounts, a likable guy who is gravely ill, and I have no personal animosity toward him. But what Daniel Gross writes about him in Slate is aggravating.
Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration’s domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush’s vaunted “ownership society”: privatizing social security, eliminating defined-benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)s; and replacing insurance with health savings accounts, high-deductible policies, and other consumer-driven health-care initiatives.
And yet Snow’s own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society—and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary.
For one thing, Snow never bothered to establish a 401k account, and he gets no pension from Fox News. He’ll get a pension through AFTRA (a union) and Social Security, and whatever he might have squirreled away to live on after retirement. And the “squirreled away” part can’t be much.
Snow admitted to feeling pinched on his salary of $168,000, which is about 3.5 times the median U.S. income. “We took out a loan when I came to the White House, and that loan is now gone,” he said. “So I’m going to have to pay the bills.”
And then there’s his cancer treatment. He’s getting regular CAT scans and MRIs and chemotherapy. Daniel Gross writes,
But such treatment is enormously expensive and only available to people who have good insurance—like the kind taxpayers fund for public employees such as Snow. If Snow had owned his own benefits, or approached health care as a consumer, as the administration wants people to do, he’d certainly be singing a different tune. Had Snow stashed a few thousand dollars in a health savings account, which is one of the administration’s chief proposals to reduce the rising number of the uninsured, he likely wouldn’t have enough cash to afford chemotherapy. According to the Census Bureau, there were 47 million Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 41.2 million in 2001, when Bush entered office. Were any of them to be afflicted with cancer as Snow has been, they’d be largely out of luck—unable to pay the bills for all those scans and chemo doses, and unable to find an insurer willing to cover such a pre-existing condition.
One wonders if this ever flickers through Tony Snow’s mind.
Of course, when it comes to health care, Republicans generally seem a tad out of the loop. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial that begins this way (emphasis added):
As Congress returns, so does the health-care debate, including an important intramural squabble among Republicans. To wit, what is the better way to move to an individual based insurance system — via a tax credit, or a tax deduction?
That’s the extent of the Republican debate?
We think the tax deduction has the better argument, especially as a matter of tax policy. Tax credit proponents tout their reform as “budget neutral,” meaning that it neither raises nor lowers overall federal revenues. But that masks the enormous shift in the tax burden that it would require, including a big tax increase on large portions of the middle class.
Congress’s Joint Tax Committee has estimated that, among families earning adjusted gross income of $75,000 a year, more would lose more tax benefits than they’d gain under the tax credit by 2009. By 2018, some 60.7 million filers — or two-thirds of today’s taxpayers — would face a net tax increase. Most of those happen to be Republican voters.
Meanwhile, the “refundable” tax credit would require some $800 billion over 10 years in new health-care spending for those who don’t pay any income taxes. In other words, a “universal” tax credit would mean a major redistribution of wealth from middle- and upper-middle-income families to subsidize health care for lower earners. Once embedded in the tax code, this would become a new “entitlement” that would be nearly impossible to repeal.
The horror.
WSJ doesn’t like the tax credit idea because, as it’s currently being proposed, the credit would go even to people who pay no income taxes at all. And this would amoun to “a government handout to buy individual insurance.”
The real argument for the tax credit idea is political — namely, that it can be called “universal” and thus claim to cover all Americans the way a government-run system would. Senators DeMint and Coburn believe this is a better strategy to counter HillaryCare and its variations. But we think they’re selling short the appeal of the deduction to most tax-paying voters.
HillaryCare = all non-rightie health care reform proposals, whether they even remotely resemble the former First Lady’s 1993 plan or not.
The Treasury Department estimates the Bush proposal would add at least five million Americans to the ranks of the insured, and that’s before the tax change led to a far more robust and affordable individual insurance market than we have currently.
Ooo, five million. That only leaves us, what? 42 million to go? And will the “more robust” individual insurance market sell insurance to people who can’t get it now because they have pre-existing conditions?
Here’s another article about “innovative” health care proposals, from Forbes, which include such breakthrough ideas as “greater transparency.” It’s all band-aids, in other words. Here’s the best part:
Duke Law School professor Clark C. Havighurst, believes that consumers are given the choice “between a Lexus, Mercedes or BMW” in health coverage. “You don’t have the choice of buying coverage that isn’t outlandishly expensive,” giving people an incentive to find lower cost health plans. “The old managed competition idea from the Clinton years is still a pretty good one,” he says.
Do these people live on the same planet we do, I wonder?
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