Dems balk at Bush's proposal

Democratic leaders said they'd block the measure.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush unveiled his health care tax plan to the nation, Congressional Democrats all but buried the proposal Wednesday, saying it could wreck the system of employer-based care and burden middle-class working families.
Beginning in 2009, Bush wants to give taxpayers with basic health insurance a standard tax deduction of 15,000 for family coverage or 7,500 for single coverage. Those whose coverage costs more -- an estimated 35 million people -- would pay taxes on the difference.
The proposal would give people who buy health insurance outside the workplace the same tax break enjoyed by those with job-based coverage. About 80 percent of the estimated 175 million people with job-based coverage would see lower taxes from the plan, the government estimates.
Health care experts have expressed modest support for the proposal as a starting point to reduce the nation's 46 million people without health insurance. But Democrats, who've long championed the cause of America's uninsured, were loath to concede the political high ground to an unpopular lame-duck president on one of their most potent domestic policy issues.
One by one on Wednesday, key Democratic leaders made it clear that they would use their new majority status to block the measure even as Bush was set to travel to Lee's Summit, Mo., on Thursday to promote the plan.
Won't even consider it
Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, said his panel won't consider Bush's proposal. "If I could just deep-six it, they'd build a statue of me in Health Care Square," Stark said. "It gives [a] 1,000 tax cut to families who don't pay any taxes and about a 6,000 benefit to people with incomes of 170,000 or more. It encourages companies to cancel their health care. It's designed for disaster."
Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said the provision of the president's plan that taxes higher-priced health plans would penalize people who are trying to provide the best care for their families.
"It is good that the president is trying to cover the uninsured, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of those in the middle class who have already achieved good health care," Schumer said.
Democrats also fear that the tax deduction could cause healthy people to forgo employer-based coverage and find better private coverage. That could leave employer plans with more old and sick people, who would drive up costs.
Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a health care research group, said Bush's plan will become an important reference point in the debate over revamping the health care system.
"I think it's just so big that people have to get their heads around it," she said.