Download or read book Tax Subsidies to Employer provided Health Insurance written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the current tax subsidy to employer- provided health insurance, and presents new evidence on the economic effects of various tax reforms. It argues that previous analyses have overstated the tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance by neglecting the substantial and growing importance of after-tax employee payments for employer-provided insurance, as well as the tax subsidy for extreme medical expenses, which discourages insurance purchase. Even after considering these factors, however, the net tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance is substantial, with tax factors generating an average reduction of approximately thirty percent in the price of this insurance. Reducing the tax subsidy, either by capping the value of employer-provided health insurance that could be excluded from taxation, or eliminating the exclusion entirely, would have substantial effects on the level of employer- provided insurance and on tax revenues.
Download or read book Revising the Tax Treatment of Employer provided Health Insurance written by Sherry Glied and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1994 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses tax treatments and how they relate to employer-provided health insurance.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies for Health Insurance written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The continued rise in the number of non-elderly Americans without health insurance has led to considerable interest in tax-based policies to raise the level of insurance coverage. This paper describes a detailed microsimulation model that has been developed to evaluate such tax-based polices, and its findings for the impact of polices on government costs and insurance coverage. I find that while tax subsidies could significantly increase insurance coverage, even very generous tax policies could not cover more than a sizable minority of the uninsured population. But there are several design features which can clearly make tax policy more effective: using tax credits rather than deductions; making credits refundable; and addressing the timing mismatch between when insurance purchases are made and tax refunds are received. I also document a clear tradeoff between the scope of tax subsidies and their efficiency.
Download or read book The Tax Treatment of Employment based Health Insurance written by Leonard Burman and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. Introduction -- II. Background -- III. Rationale for a tax subsidy for health insurance -- IV. How the tax exclusion affects the health insurance market -- V. Who benefits from the tax exclusion? -- VI. Options for changing the tax subsidy -- Appendix. Simulating options for taxing premiums for employment-based health insurance.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies for Medical Care written by United States. Congressional Budget Office and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Using Taxes to Reform Health Insurance written by Henry Aaron and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brookings Institution Press and Urban Institute publication Few people realize that one of the nation's largest health programs runs through the tax system. Reformers of all stripes propose to modify current tax rules as part of larger programs to increase coverage and control costs. Is the current system working? Will tax-based reforms achieve their goals? Several of the nation's foremost experts on taxation and health policy address these questions in Using Taxes to Reform Health Insurance, a joint product of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the American Tax Policy Institute. Led by respected economists Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution and Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute, contributors examine the role taxes currently play, the likely effects of recently introduced health savings accounts, the challenges of administering major subsidies for health insurance through the tax system, and options for using the tax system to expand health insurance coverage. No taxpayer or consumer of health care services can afford to ignore these issues.
Download or read book Subsidies to Employee Health Insurance Premiums and the Health Insurance Market written by Jonathan Gruber and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only appealing if there is a very high takeup elasticity among those who are offered and uninsured. Moreover, if plan choice decisions are price elastic, then such subsidies can at the same time increase health care costs by inducing selection of more expensive plans. We study an excellent example of such subsidies: the introduction of pre-tax premiums for postal employees in 1994, and then for the remaining federal employees in 2000. We do so using a census of personnel records for all federal employees from 1991 through 2002. We find that there is a very small elasticity of insurance takeup with respect to its after-tax price, and a modest elasticity of plan choice. Our results suggest that the federal government did little to improve insurance coverage, but much to increase health care expenditures, through this policy change.
Download or read book Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures written by United States. Department of the Treasury and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Federal Tax Incentives for Health Insurance written by Allegra N. Kim and published by California State Library. This book was released on 2007 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cross Subsidization in Employer Based Health Insurance and the Effects of Tax Subsidy Reform written by Svetlana Pashchenko and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major source of insurance coverage for non-elderly adults in the US is employer-based health insurance market. Every participant of this market gets a tax subsidy since premiums are excluded from taxable income. However, people have different incentives to participate in the employer-based pool - since premiums are independent of individual risk, high-risk individuals receive implicit cross-subsidies from low-risk individuals. In this paper we explore several ways to reform the tax subsidy by taking this implicit cross-subsidization into account. We construct a general equilibrium heterogeneous agents model and calibrate it using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Dataset. We find that even though the complete elimination of the tax subsidy leads to the unraveling of the employer-based pool, there is still room for substantial savings by targeting the tax subsidy. More specifically, the same level of risk-sharing in the employer-based market can be achieved at one third of the current costs if i) the tax subsidy is targeted only towards low-risk people who have weak incentives to participate in the pool, and ii) employer-based insurance premiums become age-adjusted. To improve welfare outcome of this reform the tax subsidy should also be extended to low-income individuals.
Download or read book The Role of Tax Subsidies in the Market for Health Insurance written by Mark Stabile and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the role of tax subsidies in linking the market for health insurance to the employment relationship. Using both American and Canadian data, it investigates how these subsidies influence whether health insurance coverage is offered in different sized firms and whether it is offered through an employer versus the individual private market. The findings indicate that tax subsidies encourage the provision of insurance in smaller firms. Removal of the subsidies would cause the level of insurance in small firms to decline significantly, but would not cause a large change in the level of insurance in larger firms. Part of this decline would be offset by increases in the market for individually purchased insurance.
Download or read book Tax Treatment of Employer based Health Insurance written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Finance and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Coverage Matters written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-10-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly 40 million Americans have no health insurance, private or public, and the number has grown steadily over the past 25 years. Who are these children, women, and men, and why do they lack coverage for essential health care services? How does the system of insurance coverage in the U.S. operate, and where does it fail? The first of six Institute of Medicine reports that will examine in detail the consequences of having a large uninsured population, Coverage Matters: Insurance and Health Care, explores the myths and realities of who is uninsured, identifies social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the situation, and describes the likelihood faced by members of various population groups of being uninsured. It serves as a guide to a broad range of issues related to the lack of insurance coverage in America and provides background data of use to policy makers and health services researchers.
Download or read book Responsible Tax Credits for Health Insurance written by Mark V. Pauly and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 2002 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1990s saw no progress in the financing of health care. About 40 million Americans still have no health insurance - including 22 per cent of America's children. This text suggests a tax credit/voucher system with as much simplicity and flexibility as possible to combat the problem
Download or read book Employer Sim Microsimulation Model written by Edward Miller and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employment-related health coverage is the predominant form of health insurance in the nonelderly, US population. Developing sound policies regarding the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance requires detailed information on the insurance benefits offered by employers as well as detailed information on the characteristics of employees and their families. Unfortunately, no nationally representative data set contains all of the necessary elements. This paper describes the development of the Employer-Sim model which models tax-based health policies by using data on workers from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS HC) to form synthetic workforces for each establishment in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance Component (MEPS IC). This paper describes the application of Employer-Sim to estimating tax subsidies to employer-sponsored health insurance and presents estimates of the cost and incidence of the subsidy for 2008. The paper concludes by discussing other potential applications of the Employer-Sim model.
Download or read book Tax Subsidies for Expanding Health Insurance Coverage written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An issue of continuing concern to Congress is the number of Americans who lack health insurance coverage. In 2001, an estimated 41.2 million Americans were uninsured for the entire year, 99% of whom were under age 65. The number of nonelderly uninsured rose each year from 1987 to 1998 and then declined in both 1999 and 2000, before increasing again in 2001. In response to the increase in the uninsured population, policymakers at the state and federal levels of government have been searching for effective, affordable, and politically feasible ways to expand access to health insurance coverage. While a variety of proposed solutions have been examined and debated, recent Congresses have shown a growing interest in tax-based approaches. In the 107th Congress, the Trade Act of 2002 established a refundable and advanceable tax credit for the purchase of qualified health insurance by individuals who lose their jobs because of foreign trade. A number of proposals to create tax subsidies for the expansion of health insurance coverage have surfaced in the 108th Congress, including measures to create two new tax-preferred health savings accounts (H.R. 2596 as incorporated into H.R. 1) and tax credits for small employers that provide health insurance coverage for eligible employees (H.R. 450, S. 10, S. 53, S. 86, and S. 414). This report summarizes what is known abut the factors shaping the costeffectiveness of tax subsidies for expanding health insurance coverage. In doing so, it reviews the principal findings of recent studies assessing the cost-effectiveness of a variety of proposed subsidies, many of which have been considered in recent Congresses. The report will be updated or revised to reflect important legislative activity, or to incorporate significant new research findings on the use of tax policy to improve health insurance coverage. Tax policy can influence the demand for health insurance by altering its after-tax cost and terms of coverage. If the principal aim of policymakers is to expand health insurance coverage at a politically acceptable cost through the use of new tax subsidies, then certain factors would be critical in designing such subsidies. One is the type of subsidy being offered. Tax deductions are more valuable to individuals in higher tax brackets than those in lower tax brackets, but the vast majority of uninsured households fall in the lower brackets. Moreover, non-refundable tax credits for the purchase of health insurance may have little impact because nearly half of uninsured households have no federal income tax liability. Another factor to consider is who would be eligible for the tax subsidy. The cost per newly insured appears to depend critically on how narrowly a subsidy is targeted. Likely targets include low-wage firms, low-income workers whose employers do not offer health insurance, and all individuals who are ineligible for public or employer-provided insurance. Other important factors shaping the efficacy of proposed tax incentives to expand health insurance coverage include the type of health insurance policies eligible for the incentives, the shares of individual and family premiums they cover, and their ultimate policy objectives.
Download or read book Two Federally Subsidized Health Insurance Programs are One Too Many written by Nicholas Drew and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health care costs in the United States have increased significantly over the past few decades. As a result, the current trends of federal health care spending are unsustainable. Section 106 of the I.R.C. contributes to the nation's increasingly large federal health care bill because it excludes employer-provided insurance benefits from the federal income tax. This results in losses of over $750 billion a year of federal revenues through what is essentially a federal spending program. This Note argues that the recent passage of the Affordable Care Act has altered many of the underlying assumptions in which the traditional arguments against repeal of I.R.C. § 106 had been grounded. By examining those arguments in light of the predicted implications of the ACA, this Note posits that the arguments in favor of sustaining I.R.C. § 106 have been rendered largely irrelevant, inapplicable, or generally less compelling - whereas the arguments in favor of repeal seem all the more convincing today.
