Lee’s Summit, Mo. – President Bush traveled to a Missouri hospital Thursday to press his case that Congress should sign on to his health care proposals, including his idea to tax employer-paid health insurance premiums as employee income.
“If you work for a company, you get your health care free, in essence, as part of your benefits package,” Bush told his seven roundtable guests, who included several small-business owners and an uninsured waitress. “If you’re a standalone person, you pay for your health care on an after-tax basis.
“In other words, there is discrimination in the tax code based upon who you work for, and it makes it harder for individuals or small-business employees to buy health care,” he said.
Members of Congress have given the idea a cold reception, saying it would make little headway toward obtaining health care for the 47 million uninsured Americans and would eventually raise costs for average families.
Bush toured the newly built hospital, part of the Kansas City-based St. Luke’s Health System, to admire its use of information technology, another cause the president has promoted. In the hospital emergency room, Bush admired a flat-screen television monitor with a blinking display of patients’ vital signs, procedures and medications.
“Medicine is finally catching up with the rest of America in terms of information technology,” Bush said.
In his State of the Union address, the president proposed making health insurance premiums paid by employers taxable to their employees as part of their compensation. At the same time, every family would receive a standard health care deduction of $15,000 ($7,500 for singles).
Families with total health care premiums below $15,000 would receive a tax break, but those with so-called gold-plated plans that cost more than $15,000 would have to pay income tax on the difference.
