Madmallard
.223 Rem
The habit hooked the state government 20 years ago this month, when the Health Care Reform Act took effect.
The main purpose of that law was to do a good thing: end state-imposed price controls on hospitals, giving free-market competition a chance to tame spiraling health-care costs. To smooth the transition, state lawmakers sent hospitals extra aid.
And they financed that aid, fatefully, with new taxes on health insurance.
The deregulation part of the law worked — at least modestly. New York’s per-capita hospital spending, which had been the highest in the country, gradually trended closer to the national norm.
But the other parts of the law — the taxes and spending — took on a life of their own.
Over the 12 years from 2000 through 2011, lawmakers either hiked the HCRA taxes or created new ones 14 times — causing annual receipts to almost triple. The addiction had taken hold.
Including the nation’s heaviest state tax on cigarettes, HCRA now brings in $5.5 billion per year, making it the third-largest tax in the nation’s highest-taxed state.
Insidiously, the surcharges on health insurance are collected in ways that hide them from public view. Yet they add as much as 6.2 percent to a typical New York City resident’s insurance costs, compounding the pain of high premiums and deductibles.
One of the surcharges, known as the “covered lives assessment,” varies wildly from one part of the state to another. In 2016, it ranged from $10.24 per year in the Utica-Watertown region to $202.82 in New York City, a difference of 1,880 percent.
Plus, the surcharges make no allowance for ability to pay, hitting families in the working and middle classes just as hard as the wealthy.
Nor is all the money well spent. Over the years, state lawmakers have funneled billions of it into programs that have no direct public-health benefit — like subsidizing doctors’ malpractice premiums, boosting pay and benefits for health-care workers or plugging holes in the state budget.
New York is addicted to health taxes | New York Post
The main purpose of that law was to do a good thing: end state-imposed price controls on hospitals, giving free-market competition a chance to tame spiraling health-care costs. To smooth the transition, state lawmakers sent hospitals extra aid.
And they financed that aid, fatefully, with new taxes on health insurance.
The deregulation part of the law worked — at least modestly. New York’s per-capita hospital spending, which had been the highest in the country, gradually trended closer to the national norm.
But the other parts of the law — the taxes and spending — took on a life of their own.
Over the 12 years from 2000 through 2011, lawmakers either hiked the HCRA taxes or created new ones 14 times — causing annual receipts to almost triple. The addiction had taken hold.
Including the nation’s heaviest state tax on cigarettes, HCRA now brings in $5.5 billion per year, making it the third-largest tax in the nation’s highest-taxed state.
Insidiously, the surcharges on health insurance are collected in ways that hide them from public view. Yet they add as much as 6.2 percent to a typical New York City resident’s insurance costs, compounding the pain of high premiums and deductibles.
One of the surcharges, known as the “covered lives assessment,” varies wildly from one part of the state to another. In 2016, it ranged from $10.24 per year in the Utica-Watertown region to $202.82 in New York City, a difference of 1,880 percent.
Plus, the surcharges make no allowance for ability to pay, hitting families in the working and middle classes just as hard as the wealthy.
Nor is all the money well spent. Over the years, state lawmakers have funneled billions of it into programs that have no direct public-health benefit — like subsidizing doctors’ malpractice premiums, boosting pay and benefits for health-care workers or plugging holes in the state budget.
New York is addicted to health taxes | New York Post
