If you want to see the unvarnished, true nature of our latest president, you need look no farther than two issues: whether to tax health plans that are deemed "too generous" and whether or how to tax the banks that brought about the financial crisis.

In the case of the health insurance tax, President Obama, after opposing the idea as a candidate when it was proposed by Republican candidate John McCain, is endorsing the Senate bill's approach, which would levy a 40% tax on all insurance plans that cost more than $8500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. According to the union movement such a tax would hit one in four union members, who over years of struggle have negotiated decent medical benefits, often foregoing pay increases in order to provide members with health coverage.It would also hit employers with older workforces, smaller employers, who have to pay more for insurance, and also employers in parts of the country where the overall payscales and cost of living are higher, such as the Northeast and the West Coast.

Obama says he thinks that taxing such plans (which are hardly "Cadillac" in today's health marketplace), would help restrain health inflation. More important, he and the Senate backers of the measure, like that it is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to bring in $149 billion in revenue over 10 years. (Note that we're talking about just $14.9 billion per year--a rather minor sum compared to the total US healthcare bill of $2.5 trillion a year, or the taxpayer's share of that bill--$1.2 trillion.)

The claim that taxing health plans which provide better coverage to people will reduce health care costs overall is spurious and based upon the work of ideological free-market economists who take it on faith that healthcare is a good which "consumers" use based upon price. This notion is far from proven and in fact many studies show it to be flat-out wrong. Most people have no idea what the price or cost of any treatment is. Whether they are in a preferred provider plan (PPO) or an HMO, most people don't know what a visit to the doctor actually costs, don't know what their medicine actually costs, and don't know the cost of a stay in the hospital. They only know what their co-pay amount is. Furthermore, when people are sick, they generally go to doctors that they believe will cure them, not to the cheapest doctor. The only thing that taxing better health insurance plans will do is lead employers to cut back on the benefits offered by those plans--most likely dropping things like mental health coverage, dental coverage, payment for medical tests, etc., and raising the co-pays. Aside from the basic unfairness of penalizing workers who have fought hard at the bargaining table to win better benefits, this tax plan simply lowers the bar for all people in terms of what quality of health insurance they receive from their employer. When union plans get whacked, you can bet that non-union plans will also get whacked, since the main reason non-union employers even offer health insurance is to help keep unions at bay.

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