As senior House Republicans work on a promised replacement for the Affordable Care Act, two GOP lawmakers plan to introduce an alternative Thursday that would dramatically reshape the nation’s health care system.
The legislation — co-sponsored by Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La. — stands little chance of becoming law as long as a Democrat is in the White House.
But just as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont shook up the Democratic presidential race by pushing the liberal dream of a “single-payer” government-run health system, Sessions and Cassidy are resurrecting a long-held conservative goal of overhauling of the health care system by rewriting part of the tax code.
In the process, the two lawmakers are also highlighting the difficult trade-offs that would be necessary in any replacement for the health law President Barack Obama signed in 2010.
The centerpiece of the Sessions-Cassidy plan is a major change to the tax code that would provide every American adult with $2,500 to purchase health coverage, but also shake up the nation’s current employer-based health insurance system.
This new standardized tax credit would replace tax breaks that many Americans currently get if their employer provides health coverage.
Health benefits, unlike wages, are not subject to income or payroll taxes, and that means that higher-wage employees with comprehensive health plans often enjoy substantially greater tax benefits than low-wage employees without health coverage.
The proposed tax credit would also be available to people who don’t have work-based insurance, thereby equalizing the tax treatment of health benefits.
“Bill Gates will get the same tax break as the guys who mow his lawn,” said John Goodman, a health economist who helped develop the Sessions-Cassidy plan.
Goodman said most Americans, particularly those with lower incomes, would end up getting more money than they do now for health insurance.
Conservatives have long argued that giving Americans a basic tax credit to use to shop for health insurance no matter where they work would free up the health insurance market and drive down costs.
Former President George W. Bush urged such an approach in his second term. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made a similar plan a major plank of his 2008 presidential run.
But such plans have never been popular, in part because they threaten to disrupt the popular employer-based system that nearly 150 million Americans rely on for health benefits.
Even many traditionally conservative business groups gave McCain’s 2008 plan a cool reception.
Goodman — a longtime advocate of health savings accounts, or HSAs, and other tools to make consumers shop more for health services — said the Sessions-Cassidy plan would be less disruptive than McCain’s because it would allow Americans to remain in their current health plan if they like it.
Nevertheless, many conservative health policy experts have concluded that any health care legislation that aims to replace the Affordable Care Act shouldn’t overhaul employer-based coverage because that would be too controversial.
“One thing we know is that employers are very good at getting people covered,” said Tevi Troy, a former health official in the Bush administration who now works with businesses on health policy.
“I worry about something that might knock employers out of the game.”
About the Author
