Tax, spend and regulate -- no solution on health care

By Nathaniel Ward
The Heritage Foundation

While the media focused its attention on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, liberals in the House of Representatives introduced a health care "reform" package that will cost $245 billion a year by 2019.

Heritage Foundation blogger Conn Carroll digs into an alarming aspect of the legislation: it will effectively regulate your private health insurance plan out of business. Here's how it works, as Carroll explains:

[A]ll health insurance plans must confirm to a slew of new regulations, including community rating and guaranteed issue. These will all drive up the cost of health insurance. Furthermore, all these new regs would not apply just to individual insurance plans, but to all insurance plans. So the House bill will also drive up the cost of your existing employer coverage. Until, of course, it becomes too expensive and they just dump you into the government plan.

And all this will come at a huge cost to taxpayers. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the price tag of these "reforms" will soar after 2012, reaching as high as $245 billion in 2019. (Curious, isn't it, that the costs increase only after 2012? What happens in 2012?)

Not only that, but the plan will cost taxpayers more than $800 billion in new taxes over the next decade. If you count state income taxes, the top marginal tax rate will top 50 percent in many states—and five states will have higher top rates than any European country expect Denmark. (France's top rate is 45.8 percent, and Germany's is 47.47 percent.)

Needless to say, this will be a disaster for the economy. "This runaway spending, coupled with the Democrats plans to raise taxes, will kill our struggling economy and leave us with double digit unemployment for years to come," Heritage's Conn Carroll writes. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office comes to a similar conclusion.