Sunday, July 20, 2008

Resisting Tax Increases

Business in Maine and Mass. Get Some Backbone

By Greg Scandlen

Categories: Maine, Massachusetts

Here’s a news flash for you – UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE COSTS MORE THAN PROPONENTS CLAIM! Yes, indeedy! Folks get these sweeping bills enacted by promising they won’t cost the taxpayers much. And a year or two later they ALWAYS come back for a tax increase to “complete the job.”

The Maine legislature enacted a raft of new taxes to pay for its Dirigo program – a first-ever tax on soft drinks, a doubling of the tax on beer and wine, and a 1.8% tax on all health care claims paid by insurers and TPAs – all to pay for a teensy 13,000 people now enrolled in the Dirigo program.

But a new business coalition was formed to put an initiative on the ballot to repeal these taxes. Business Insurance reports that the “Fed Up With Taxes” coalition has succeeded in gathering 90,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot in November.

SOURCE: Business Insurance

And in Massachusetts, the business community is finally getting some backbone and resisting a proposal by Governor Deval Patrick’s to raise another $100 million in taxes on business, insurers and hospitals to pay for the Commonwealth program. The governor, of course, describes the tax increase as “modest,” a hint that there is more to come.

In fact, people in Massachusetts tell me off the record that the business community is talking about preparing an ERISA challenge to the pay-or-play assessment in that state. They haven’t bothered to do so until now because the assessment was modest and they wanted to be cooperative to have the old “seat at the table.” But now they expect the bite to sink deeper and start to hurt. Well, duh! What in the world did they expect?

By the way, if they do bring an ERISA challenge, it will succeed and the program will be killed unless the state finds another source of subsidy.

SOURCE: Boston Globe