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Rather than health care costs being completely 100% tax deductible, you just need the health insurance premiums to be covered, and you can index the deduction a

by dwd 6y ago

Rather than health care costs being completely 100% tax deductible, you just need the health insurance premiums to be covered, and you can index the deduction against taxable income if you want. The kicker, and this is where the US mindset gets hung-up is that you need to incentivise the insurers to cover everyone (including preexisting conditions) by making it mandatory for everyone to have health insurance so there are enough healthy people (who don't make claims) in the system to make it profitable.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> you need to incentivise the insurers to cover everyone (including preexisting conditions) by making it mandatory for everyone to have health insurance There’s a stupid simple workaround. Everyone gets taxed equal to the lowest-tier health insurance. When a health insurer signs someone up, they can claim from this kitty. Insurers can’t deny signing someone up for the lowest tier. When insurers breach certain actuarial limits, for example, if their pool of insured proves unusually old or sick, they can claim from this kitty. If the limits are properly set, healthy people foregoing insurance becomes a non-issue. They’re pre-paying for a benefit they fail to claim.
- brokensegue 6y ago
  Isn't this basically what Obamacare tried to do? Except with a lower tax?
  - occamrazor 6y ago
    The mandate under ACA was probably already too weak. Unfortunately it has been further weakened.
  - dwd 6y ago
    I believe they tried but couldn't get it to pass. This is the Australian model. If you don't have insurance there's a Medicare surcharge based on your taxable income. The Gov gives you a tax rebate if you do have insurance. https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Medicare-levy/Private-health-insurance-rebate/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Medicare-levy/Private-hea... Premiums go up each April within an allowable increase and are published on a Gov site. I worked on integrating this for a comparison site years back - the market is pretty competitive, but has been broken to an extent in recent years by providers signing up as preferred partners with various insurers and insurers just buying up providers. An interesting side is the APRA regulations regarding how many policies an insurer is allowed to issue based on the capital they hold. They needed monthly caps on how many policies they wanted (we got feeds back on leads that signed up) and some of the smaller ones occasionally asked to be removed from the panel when they were hitting their limit.

by dwd 6y ago

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> you need to incentivise the insurers to cover everyone (including preexisting conditions) by making it mandatory for everyone to have health insurance There’s a stupid simple workaround. Everyone gets taxed equal to the lowest-tier health insurance. When a health insurer signs someone up, they can claim from this kitty. Insurers can’t deny signing someone up for the lowest tier. When insurers breach certain actuarial limits, for example, if their pool of insured proves unusually old or sick, they can claim from this kitty. If the limits are properly set, healthy people foregoing insurance becomes a non-issue. They’re pre-paying for a benefit they fail to claim.

brokensegue 6y ago
Isn't this basically what Obamacare tried to do? Except with a lower tax?
- occamrazor 6y ago
  The mandate under ACA was probably already too weak. Unfortunately it has been further weakened.
- dwd 6y ago
  I believe they tried but couldn't get it to pass. This is the Australian model. If you don't have insurance there's a Medicare surcharge based on your taxable income. The Gov gives you a tax rebate if you do have insurance. https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Medicare-levy/Private-health-insurance-rebate/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Medicare-levy/Private-hea... Premiums go up each April within an allowable increase and are published on a Gov site. I worked on integrating this for a comparison site years back - the market is pretty competitive, but has been broken to an extent in recent years by providers signing up as preferred partners with various insurers and insurers just buying up providers. An interesting side is the APRA regulations regarding how many policies an insurer is allowed to issue based on the capital they hold. They needed monthly caps on how many policies they wanted (we got feeds back on leads that signed up) and some of the smaller ones occasionally asked to be removed from the panel when they were hitting their limit.