Tag: Eugene Steuerle

The Supreme Court and the Mathless Health Care Reform Debate

Eugene Steuerle

Posted 4/10/12 on The Government We Deserve

Regardless of how the Supreme Court decides the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the health care debate is now reignited. If the mandate is sustained, the Accountable Care Act enacted under President Obama still has too many kinks to remain unaltered. If it’s thrown out, a return to the unsustainable system with growing numbers of uninsured is not a solution. Yet no fix is possible as long as elected officials dodge the basic arithmetic of health care.

As for the individual mandate, ignore the constitutional briefs for the moment. Ignore also how a mandate helps address problems that arise if insurance companies must offer coverage regardless of prior conditions and people otherwise are tempted to wait until they are sick to buy it. Instead, let’s see how a mandate fits it into the broader arithmetic of paying for health care.

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Health Reform: An Amicus Brief for the Court of Public Opinion

C. Eugene Steuerle

Posted 3/23/12 on the The Government We Deserve

The Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act at the end of the month. We the public should be appalled.

It’s not that each side can’t come up with some good constitutional arguments. It’s that the suit is totally unnecessary, caused largely by the unwillingness of the major political parties to work together on anything. Like a divorce between two parties more invested in their fight than in the effect on those around them, it belongs in a domestic relations court that would refer the parties to a mediator.

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The Pointless Debate over the Social Security Trust Fund

C. Eugene Steuerle

First published 3/24/11 on The Government We Deserve

Once again, policy-watchers and policymakers are fired up over whether Social Security needs to be fixed anytime soon. Some resort to pretty arcane debates over the trust fund to make their point. Won’t it take years to exhaust the trust fund? Are the bonds in the trust fund real? Is the trust fund a fiction? Was the trust fund raided? You know, it scarcely matters. All these debates are over a tiny sliver of the Social Security System—not over where the real action is.

What does matter is that Social Security expenses are expected to rise by about 50 percent—from about 4.3 to 6.3 percentage points of GDP—from 2008 to 2030, and taxes aren’t. As the baby boomers retire, higher expenses and less tax revenue mean that the national deficit will rise year after year.

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Health Care Brawl: All or Nothing Doesn’t Work

EUGENE STEUERLE Originally published 1/17/11 in The Fiscal Times

In today’s world, health reform succeeds only if it goes hand in hand with reasonable budget constraints on health spending. But the debate beginning in the House today isn’t about benefits versus costs. Instead, it’s a winner-take-all spectacle like the Super Bowl. Vote “Yes” or “No” on rescinding recent health legislation. Yes or no on regulating Medicare. Thumbs up or down on the constitutionality of an “individual mandate.” Continue reading “Health Care Brawl: All or Nothing Doesn’t Work” →

Are You Paying Your Fair Share For Medicare?

Eugene Steuerle

Originally published 12/7/10 on The Government We Deserve

What do you pay in Medicare taxes? And what Medicare benefits can you expect? This issue—potent now that the first baby boomers are turning 65—was highlighted recently by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in a widely read Associated Press story.

It’s no secret that early generations of Social Security beneficiaries got more out of the system than they paid into it. Beneficiaries in the 1940s and 1950s paid very low Social Security taxes for only a few years, then retired and received benefits for the rest of their lives. Until recently, in fact, almost all generations of retirees fared rather well. After all, the combined employer and employee tax rate for Old Age, Survivors, and Disability insurance, or OASDI, was kept low relative to benefits that would later be received. That combined rate equaled only 3.0 percent of earnings in 1950 and 6.0 percent in 1960, and it didn’t rise to its still-inadequate level of 12.4 percent until the late 1980s. Since most of these revenues weren’t saved, the increased OASDI tax rate supported ever-rising transfers to beneficiaries.

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Fixing the Nation’s Four-Tranche Universal Health System

C. EUGENE STEUERLE

Originally Published 10/28/2010 on The Government We Deserve

U.S. citizens soon will be participating in a four-part, nearly universal, health care system. Medicare, Medicaid, employer-provided health, and the new exchange insurance policies all come with different government subsidies.

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