According to the Associated Press, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has managed to find a way to make even less sense than Obama on the subject of healthcare.  Assuming that the AP article is an accurate reflection of what Senator Baucus actually said, he has just added another huge contradiction to the healthcare debate.

From the article:

A key Senate chairman says he hopes to convince President Barack Obama that taxing some employer-provided health benefits will help control escalating health care costs  … Baucus says the tax-free benefit packages Americans now enjoy are a big factor in the high costs of the country’s health care system, because they provide workers free or low-cost access to too many health care services.

So, according to Senator Baucus, a “big factor” which makes healthcare more expensive are “tax-free benefit packages … [that] provide workers with free or low cost access to … health care services.”  Put another way, healthcare costs so much because people don’t  have to spend a lot of money to get it.  Yet a third way, healthcare is expensive because it’s not.

Senator Baucus’s solution, which I guess is pretty obvious if you can swallow the contradiction above, is to tax private healthcare benefits.  The line of reasoning is certainly sound: Make healthcare more affordable by increasing the price.  Of course, with President Obama wrangling with care providers to knock costs lower, the only way to jack up the price is to do so artificially, with a tax.

Of course, it is possible that I misrepresented the Senator, and honesty demands that I address his “too many” straw man.  While some people certainly do behave this way, I know of very few people who seek out medical services that they do not actually need.  Indeed, part of the reason America’s emergency rooms are so full is the fact that most people don’t seek out medical services until they’ve long past needed them.  Even if you assume that people are overconsuming healthcare, are they doing so to the tune of offsetting nearly 46 million people who are not insured at all, and for whom President Obama wants to guarantee “free or low-cost” coverage?  And even if the answer is somehow, astonishingly, yes, exactly how is the government going to determine when a person has used “too many … services”?  And why wouldn’t private insurers do the same thing if they could?

The string of illogic given to us by Senator Baucus is only reconcilable with the proposition that he wants to end private insurance without saying so.  If President Obama goes back on his campaign rhetoric mocking McCain for supposedly having similar ambitions, it will be proof even stronger that his goals are the same.

Perhaps we should have given honest debate a health insurance plan ages ago.

Tags: economics, healthcare, logic, taxes