Historic Vote on Health Care
By Ric Joyner
I watched all day. Fortunately it was raining here in Florida. The final voting came about 10.15 pm. It is historic for several reasons. First, no republicans voted in favor of the bill. This is much different than Social Security or Medicare which had republican support. The accounting on this bill is suspect because it creates new taxes for 4 years before people start to get coverage (the many uninsured). To be fair there are some things in the bill that are helpful which are actually Republican ideas (according to Nancy Pelosi tonight in her floor speech). Some of the immediate good things are that it will require insurance companies to forgo any pre-existing limitations and allow adult children to be on their parents insurance until age 26. But it does force everyone to purchase some form of insurance. But what does this mean for eflex?
To be frank… not sure. We are not clear if the bill becomes law now or after the president signs it or after the Senate gets done with it thus it is up in the air when the taxes take effect. This bill has $500,000,000,000 in new taxes and eflex will be affected as an employer with benefits You as an employee may be affected as well. We are not sure as of this date the exact impact. As more info becomes available we will keep you informed.
But how will it affect eflex? Well there are two areas where we are affected. We are a TPA for Consumer Driven Plans. I am not exactly sure where CDH will fit in but my guess is that it will be a boon for us because the better the coverage an employer has the more the cost for employees and employers so there may be a scramble to buy HRAs and flex plans. But I am not totally sure which bill we are looking at because there are so many different versions. There is the President’s plan, the Senate plan (which was the one the house passed last night) and the one that limits FSAs and removes OTC. Currently, with your help, those of NAPBA and ecfc we were able to get a reprieve on both OTC and FSAs for a couple of years.
As an employer, we will have to sift through the taxes we will face in the next few months.
So I will keep you posted. Regardless, of where you stand thanks much for sharing your voice.
Another reason it is historic vote, is that with taxes comes loss of freedom. (the government doesn’t know better how to spend your money but they will try). Second, when the democrats pushed Social Security and Medicare in the past, the country has a $35,000,000,000,000 (trillion) unpaid balance!! So while some who favor this bill, feel good today that this passed their kids, grandkids and great grandkids will pay for this and they will have higher taxes. And the sad thing is that our founding fathers didn’t want big government (England) telling them how to live and how to spend their money. The Founders tried a large experiment that has never been done in the history of the world at that time, where individuals could succeed or fail on their own without government interfering. This vote moves us away from what our founding fathers wanted and even may be unconstitutional! In fact, 38 states are starting lawsuits against the federal government over the mandate for the their residents who are forced to buy insurance!
The last reason it is historic is that the polls show 55% of Americans are against this bill and 35% are for the bill. It is literally unheard of for a political party to go against the majority of American people in this manner. Most Americans, including me, want health care reforms but not this big and with such high taxes that will certainly affect the economy.
This is actually a beginning not the end of how the bill will look. The republicans in the Senate have a chance to strip out some of the problems in this bill.
Remember too that 35 democrats departed from their party leadership and they will pay dearly by their party. The way this happens is that the party leadership will hold back on political chairmanships, office space and funding for their future campaigns!!
So it took real courage for the 35 + or – to vote against this monster.