| Baalzamon said: I want people's honest thoughts on a potential 25% income tax to pay for "Medicare For All". I'm not talking about the likelihood of this occurring. I'm talking, do you think this is reasonable, and more appropriately, do you think the average American can actually afford this. This has nothing to do with being for or against healthcare etc. My personal scenario is I would likely have to sell my house to not go bankrupt if my taxes increased by 25%. My and my wives current expenditures related to healthcare including employee and employer contributions are approximately $10,000 per year. Assuming our income goes up by the employer contributions and adding a 25% tax and reducing the standard deduction would result in additional taxes of over 25k per year. Reduce the $10k less in current insurance expenses and we are out $15000 every single year. This is quite substantially more than we would currently be out if we maxed out our insurance every single year...and somehow I would now need to determine how to save an additional $1,250 per month. They are trying to say they absolutely will not tax the middle class, but I see today one of the proposals is an across the board income tax rate increase of 25%. Our income is absolutely within middle class, and this will decimate us. |
Any tax that is imposed would be a highly progressive tax, meaning that many individuals would likely pay nothing into it, and many others would pay much less than they are currently paying for healthcare.
That being said, I'm not really sure where you got the implication of a 25% across the board tax. As far as I know, Warren is the only one who has released a detailed explanation of how she would pay for Medicare for All and it did not include this provision (in fact, it explicitly states no tax increase for the middle class).
As for your later question regarding the cost, Medicare for All is not increasing the cost of healthcare. It is reducing it. However, it moves the cost from employers and individuals to the government. This means that the government needs revenue to cover this. Individuals and employers would not simply shift who they would be paying to, they would simply stop paying without additional taxes. That is why Warren proposes, for example, increasing business taxes to make up for what they are currently paying into healthcare (which would generate just shy of $1t per year).
