Hiding health care cost?--How about taxes too?

Ezra Klein:

The most important health-care document released this week was not Sen. Max Baucus's Healthy Future Act. It was the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 Employer Benefits Survey.

While the proposal by Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, outlines a direction for policy, the survey, which polls employers about health benefits to assemble a detailed look at the actual cost of health care, fits it squarely in our pocketbooks.

The truth is we all pay, and much more than we recognize, for health care.

For many, it's among the largest investments we'll make, on par, even, with the money we spend on a house or tuck away for retirement. But while it's easy to track our stock portfolios as they tank along with the market, our outlay for health care is less obvious. Employers pay some, and so do individuals, and taxpayers. And some even hides behind the deficit. As such, few of us see the full picture. But to make sense of the proposals for reform, getting a grasp of the cost is critical.

The average health-care coverage for the average family now costs $13,375, according to Kaiser. Over the past decade, premiums have increased by 138 percent. And if the trend continues, by 2019 the average family plan will cost $30,083.

Three years of slightly above-average health insurance will cost a solid six figures.

Those are numbers to marvel at. Those are numbers to fear. But they are not the numbers that loom in the minds of most Americans. And therein lies the problem for health-care reform.

About 160 million Americans receive health coverage through their employers. In general, the employer picks up 73 percent of the tab. This seems like a good deal. In reality, that money comes out of wages.

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The same thing can be said of payroll taxes and income taxes that are withheld. It is one of those scams the government pulls to hide the pain of high taxes. If liberals are going to be arguing that the same thing happens with health care they are on a slippery slope, if conservatives push the same line on taxes.

This appears to be the latest in a line of arguments for the Democrat control freak health care agenda. I don't think it will work any better than the other arguments pushed. The main reason it want work, is that it is disingenuous.

The Democrats main objective is a power grab on a significant sector of the economy. They try to hide that with "concerns" about the uninsured. They are selling change that people do not want adn they are trying to get too much control of our lives.