Health Care at Tax Time: Two Reasons to Feel Really Bad
By Richard E. Ralston
April 13, 2004
As you raise a pen to sign your tax return this year, you will
undoubtedly regret that the United States Treasury is taking so much
of your income. You should also ask why so much of the income you
have left is spent on health care and health insurance. The two
questions are related.
The plain fact is that the U.S. Government spends more of your
tax dollars “providing” health care every year. The expense is
increasing rapidly, and the rate of increase for Medicare and
other programs will escalate further as the years pass. At the same
time, what you have to pay for health care or health insurance will
increase even faster. This may seem illogical. It is not. It is the
ruthless logic of cause and effect. Your health care costs will
continue to escalate not in spite of government involvement with
health care, but because of it.
Does anyone really believe that, if the cost of something is a
problem, the Federal government is the solution? As Jay Leno
remarked last year, “If you think health care is expensive now, just
wait until it is free.”
Contemporary medicine, from the development of new prescription
drugs, to revolutionary diagnostic tools, to innovative new
treatments and break-through surgical procedures, is a highly
technological field. It is changing at breath-taking speed, based on
dynamic science that the government cannot begin to understand, let
alone micro-manage. A few hundred thousand civil servants will not
add clarity to the process. If they try hard, they can probably
destroy a lot of this progress through rationing, controls,
bureaucracy, and political favoritism. But the traditional
government approach—pumping in billions of dollars of government
money—has not heretofore demonstrated an ability to decrease costs.
The government cannot even control the cost of something as
straightforward as postage stamps!
Health care can be expensive. Innovation, break-through
technologies, and new drugs all require brains, hard work, and
freedom. Private investors require one other thing that government
programs do not: results. Government spending and controls will
chase away the investments that get results, and attract those who
want to build administrative empires with your taxes.
A near government monopoly on anything becomes an enormous magnet
that draws in special interests, political cronies, and anyone with
an agenda that cannot resist the levers of power. What has long
since happened to education in this country is now happening to
medicine. Will powerful national health care unions focus on better
health care for individuals, or on higher wages and shorter hours
for their members? Will politicians put the interest of patients
first, or the interests of workers whose paychecks are automatically
tapped every month to make political contributions? Will the quality
of health care improve for everyone, or only for those with
“politically correct” diseases—if even them? Will affirmative action
mean that the best health care will be reserved for those who used
to get the worst? The possibilities that politicians can exploit are
endless.
The best way to reduce both taxes and the cost of health care is
to keep control of your own health care. That means that you have to
take responsibility to insure that it is paid for. Recent tax code
provisions for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) can help you do this.
In conjunction with low premium, high-deductible health insurance
policies, this puts health care within the financial reach of most
Americans. While President Bush has unfortunately done much to
expand government involvement in your health care, he has now made
one decent proposal—tax exemption for the cost of those insurance
premiums.
If you would like to have a healthier experience on April 15th in
future years, look into tax free Health Savings Accounts. Fight to
liberate your health insurance premiums from the burden of tax, and
to keep the heavy hand of government managed health care from
threatening your life.
Richard E. Ralston is Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Copyright © 2004 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
Send reprint requests to . Reprints must include above copyright statement.
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