Will the President add More Taxes on State Employees?

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Is the president planning on taxing health benefits? What would that mean to State Employees that were just hit with a nearly $900.00 per year increase? Depending on what kind of tax and at what level State Employees could face from nothing to several thousand dollars a year in pay cuts. It gets worse later. If the benefits are based on a fixed dollar amount then at the rate health care has been increasing for twenty years 90% of your health care would be taxable within ten years.

President Obama seems to be turning 180 degrees from his campaign attacks against John McCain's suggestion that health care benefits should be taxed. He said it to McCain's face and he ran TV spots chastising the Senator for even thinking of taxing health care.

Now he has told Democratic senators that he is willing to consider taxing employer-sponsored health benefits to help pay for a broad expansion of coverage.

This is thin ice for Obama who said, while debating John McCain "For the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits," "Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them, too."

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Obama seemed willing to change the existing tax break for employer paid health care. The decision will anger supporters and especially supporters who are in the same unions that had so much to do with Obama getting elected.

White House officials said taxing health insurance benefits provided by employers is not Obama's first choice, but did not rule out the possibility.

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.) supports imposing a tax on certain health plans (read that as Union plans). Sen. Democrat Sherrod Brown (Ohio) says such a tax would unfairly hurt middle-class workers with good benefits.

Several ideas have been floated, taxing all benefits, a benefit cap, that could kick in at some dollar amount, only taxing benefits for employees that make above a certain income level. Health Care should be available to all. I don't know if we can get there if the plan is to take it away from the middle class with tax policies that make a good plan unaffordable.

I do know that the Republican party on the whole will do everything it can to keep your health care dollars going to make profits for the few, not health care for all.

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