How The House Wants You to Pay for Health Care

Following up on yesterday’s post about taxes to pay for health care reform, here is where Charlie Rangel wants to go:

From The Hill:

The House will propose raising taxes on people earning more than $350,000 a year to pay $540 billion for healthcare reform, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Friday.

House Democrats had been weighing a plethora of other tax increases, such as levies on sugary soft drinks and alcohol, that raised hackles within their caucus.

Instead, Rangel said Democrats will seek to enact one large tax increase targeting wealthier workers to generate the revenue they need to finance their $1 trillion-plus healthcare reform bill.

“We have decided that instead of putting pieces of different revenue raisers together, that the best that we can do [is] we would have graduated surtaxes starting at [$]350],000],” Rangel said. The tax hikes would begin in 2011 and raise $540 billion over 10 years, he said after a meeting with Democratic committee members.

The price tag of the bill is expected to be around $1 trillion. Democrats have already tentatively assembled a package of spending cuts worth around $500 billion, mostly from Medicare and Medicaid.

According to the article there would be surcharges of 1%, 2% and 3% at income levels of $350,000, $500,000 and $1,000,000 respectively.

Of course, this is the going in price. We all know that over the long run this program is going to actually save money by controlling costs — don’t we? So surely these surcharges are temporary.

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