Democrats’ Taxing Health Care Promises
July’s Democratic presidential debates left seasoned health policy professionals confused, struggling to understand both the candidates’ policies and the differences among them. But working families should find Democrats’ health care debate taxing for another reason. For all their vows that Americans can obtain unlimited “free” health care while only “the rich” will pay, the major candidates are writing out checks that will end up on middle class families’ tab.
In this debate, Bernie Sanders wins credit for candor, in the sense that he has dissembled less than his opponents. Admitting that his single-payer plan will require tax hikes, in April Sanders proposed a 4% income tax, along with a 7.5% payroll tax, among other revenue increases to fund his system.
Unfortunately for Sanders, however, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget believes the tax increases he has proposed to date will pay for only about half of the more than $30 trillion cost of his single-payer scheme. In that, the organization echoes experience from Sanders’ home state of Vermont. In 2014, Gov. Peter Shumlin abandoned efforts to enact a state-based single payer system, because the accompanying tax increases created “a risk of an economic shock.” Shumlin said single payer in Vermont would have required a 9.5% income tax, and an 11.5% payroll tax—far higher levels than Sanders has proposed.
While Sanders admits that the middle class will pay more taxes to fund single payer, both he and Elizabeth Warren argue that families will save overall, because the program would eliminate premiums, deductibles, and other forms of cost-sharing. Unfortunately, studies from across the political spectrum—from the conservative Heartland Institute to former Clinton Administration official Kenneth Thorpe—disagree.
In 2016, Thorpe concluded that 71% of households would pay more under a Sanders plan fully funded by tax increases. Low-income households would get hit even worse, with 85% of families on Medicaid paying more. Since then, Sanders has only increased the generosity of his single-payer proposal, meaning taxes on the middle class could rise even more than Thorpe originally estimated.
Perhaps to elide the tax landmines, Kamala Harris’ plan breaks with Warren and Sanders, delaying the move to a single payer system for a decade. She claims the delay “will lower the overall cost of the program”—but only until the program phases in fully. At that point, her pledge not to raise taxes on families making under $100,000 will prove unsustainable. But if Harris has her way, a 10-year delay until full implementation of single-payer could punt the tax problem to her successor.
As for Joe Biden, he has tried to portray himself as protecting middle class families from the tax hikes he calls inevitable under the other major contenders’ plans. But Biden has two problems.
First, Biden supports restoring Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty, which Republicans eliminated in 2017. The Supreme Court in 2012 dubbed the mandate a tax—and that tax happens to hit the middle class hard. The most recent IRS data show that in 2016, of the $3.6 billion in mandate penalties paid by American households, nearly 63% came from households with incomes of under $50,000, and more than 88% came from households with incomes below $100,000.
Second, as the Wall Street Journal reported back in July, Biden over the past two years deliberately utilized tax loopholes to avoid paying Obamacare taxes. By classifying more than $13 million in proceeds from books and speeches as profits from his corporations, rather than wage income, Joe and Jill Biden circumvented nearly $500,000 in self-employment taxes—taxes that fund Obamacare and Medicare.
Biden’s behavior, which multiple experts interviewed by the Journal called legally questionable, belies both his “Middle Class Joe” reputation and his support for Obamacare. Apparently, Biden supports Obamacare only if someone else will pay for it. But if a one-percenter like Joe Biden finds paying for the Affordable Care Act unaffordable for him, then whom would Biden hit to pay the $750 billion price tag of his Obamacare expansion efforts? Why, the middle class, of course.
Biden’s unwillingness to pay the taxes associated with an Obamacare law he purportedly wants to protect epitomizes Margaret Thatcher’s axiom that socialists eventually run out of other people’s money. At the rate he and his fellow candidates are racking up costly health care promises, that moment seems very near at hand.
This post was originally published at The Daily Wire.