Still No Solution from Obama on Healthcare, Considering Taxing Health Benefits...

first off, read this:

Source: Associated PressWASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is leaving the door open to taxing health care benefits, something he campaigned hard against while running for president. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., raised the issue with Obama during a private meeting Tuesday with the president and other Democratic senators and later reported the president's response: "It's on the table. It's an option."The federal government would reap about $250 billion a year if it treated health care benefits given to employees like wages and taxed them.Baucus and others are eyeing that money as they search for ways to pay for a costly health care overhaul that would extend coverage to 50 million Americans who are now uninsured. That could cost some $1.5 trillion over 10 years.The president adamantly opposed health benefit taxes during the campaign, arguing they would undermine job-based coverage. But he's now indicating openness to that suggestion from Congress, even if he criticized Republican presidential rival John McCain for proposing a sweeping version of the same basic idea.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090602/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_overhaul

This is absolutely outrageous! Obama's "solution" to healthcare reform thusfar looks to me something like this: a regressive, indirect tax on working people who already have benefits to pay for subsidies to be paid to the private insurance industry, which we'll all be legally mandated to buy into (Massachusets, Vermont plans) like we are mandated to buy car insurance, and tax penalties at the end of the year is you fail to buy in but aren't poor enough, according to the government, to qualify for a "public option" like medicade, medicare or s-chip...

Public healthcare, or "single payer" (check out HR676@ http://www.hr676.org/) , cannot work side by side with private, for profit insurance companies. A weak "public option" co-existing with subsidized and mandated private coverage will, in fact, likely only turn much of the public against socialized medicine and public care plans that will really cover everyone (for free!) like single payer, as represented in HR676. I'm beginning to think that perhaps turning the public against public care is just what certain elements of the Democratic Party, who are beholden to their insurance company and healthcare industry campaign contributors and lobbyists, perhaps really wanted in the first place; and that includes Obama. I don't think that this line of thought is "conspiranoia", I mean, we must not forget that these career politicians' loyalties lie with those who helped them get elected, and in so many cases that is the for-profit healthcare, insurance and drug industries.

Sorry, but I seem to have forgotten, who exactly was it that decided single payer is "off the table", anyway?






Paul J P