i can understand the 'fee' or 'license' part that concerns you, but the tax part is on profit...whether it is state or federal....you gotta make a profit to be taxed....no?
License fees are taxes imposed on the right to do business. An insurance company or agency is a business just like a pharmacy or clothing store or auto repair shop is a business and as such pays a variety of state and local taxes for the right to do business in that location regardless of whether it shows a profit or not. To the extent a public option would be successful, these fees and taxes would be lost as more agencies closed and more agents lost their jobs and more office workers from these agencies lost their jobs, and of course, all the revenues these jobs generated would be lost to the state and local governments. If your state or city is home to insurance companies, your local and state economies and your government coffers would be especially hard hit.
so the complaint is that health insurance as the public option will cost us consumers LESS money and we will pay less in taxes and fees normally priced in to the product by the private sector insurer if we choose the public option?
And this is not a good thing for us and health care reform?
you are actually fighting or taking the stance that it is GOOD that we pay so MUCH for our health insurance because our State gets to get more taxes from us toomuchtime, no???
I am uncertain if this is intentional on your part, but isn't that the end result of what you are arguing? And if intentional....please explain why you think this is good?
care
There is no reason to think a public option will be able to provide health insurance at a lower price that private insurers if Congress does not subsidize it or later pass additional legislation to compel health care providers to accept lower payments. Contrary to the beliefs of many, no country that has lower health care costs than we do has them because of a government run insurance program; the lower costs are produced by coercive legislation that forces health care providers to accept lower payments. The public option as written in the current House bill will not not use Medicare rates but will negotiate with providers to set rates in the same way insurance companies do. So while a public option will cost the state revenues and reduce the amount of investment capital available to grow the economy and create jobs, it will offer nothing to help lower health insurance rates.
If Obama and Pelosi wanted to lower health insurance premiums, all they would have to do is use the same authority they are invoking to tell insurance companies what kind of policies they must sell and limit the company's right to raise premiums to tell insurance companies they they cannot pay providers any more than Medicare does. If they passed such a law premiums would go down without any public option and if they don't legislate lower compensation for providers, premiums will not go down even if there is a public option.
If you think about it, it is obvious that without paying providers less, there is no reasonable basis for believing insurance premiums can be reduced, but if Obama and Pelosi had started out saying they intended to cut reimbursement rates for all health care providers, all of these providers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical device manufacturers, etc., would have immediately combined to fight against this legislation from the start, so Obama and Pelosi made up this lie about insurance companies' "obscene" profits being the cause of high premiums and that meant the solution was a public option that would not have to earn "obscene" profits, about 3.5% on revenues.
However, while Obama and Pelosi thought their supporters were stupid enough to believe the lie about insurance companies' "obscene" 3.5% profits being the cause of high insurance premiums, they were not stupid enough to believe it themselves, and that's why Pelosi and the other liberal Dems fought so hard to tie the public option's rates to Medicare, because they understood that if they didn't do that, the public option would not be able to offer lower rates.
