Another day, another knife in the back from the President. The House version of health care reform wants to pay for the bill, in part, by taxing individuals who make more than $500,000 and couples who make more than a million. This would raise an estimated $450 billion over ten years. Pardon me, but I have no problem with that. The Senate takes a different approach. They want to tax insurance companies on plans valued at over $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for couples, which would raise about a third of the revenue the House bill would (and of course would be passed on as premium increases to “We the People”). I’m not exactly sure how they “value” insurance plans (the cheapest “family” plan where I work costs about $24,000 a year between employer and employee contributions, if that’s how they’ll do it), but it certainly sounds as if the Senate version would screw working people who have decent insurance plans, which is why organized labor opposes it.

Yesterday, President Obama met with House Democrats to tell them he supports the Senate version. So, just to review, you’ll be forced to get insurance (or get fined), that insurance will not be allowed to include certain medical procedures for women, you won’t have the option of buying in to a public plan or Medicare, and if the insurance you’ve been forced to buy happens to be pretty good (probably because you’re represented by one of those godless unions, or you work for a company that’s big enough to negotiate a good deal), you’ll get punished for it. All so that rich people don’t have to pay back a buck or two of the tax breaks that Bush gave them over the past 8 years. Nice, eh?