Monday, March 08, 2010

Cadillac plans

I think I understand most of the elements of the healthcare debate. However, I don't understand the fascination with taxing "Cadillac plans". Generally speaking, I have to imagine plans like this are high margin, which means at least one of two things:
1) Insurance companies are making a lot of profit off of the people that have them.
2) The margin from these is used to subsidize lower margin products.

Why is either of these a concern for the government? Why tax it? I'm honestly stumped.

If people are willing to pay in inordinately into healthcare, God bless them at this point. Glad someone is.

The greatest irony to me is that (here I completely lack the data) I would assume that the largest contingencies who would have such sweet plans would either be union or government workers - not the folks Democrats generally like to foist taxes upon.

1 comment:

Tyler said...

I've thought about this and come up with a few reasons. 1-Cadillac plans take advantage of a tax incentive that they are trying to curtail. They are basically a way of paying someone more with out having that marginal income get taxed. Therefore they also incentivize high use of health care, which I believe you would agree drives up costs for all.