Looks like Mom was on the roof on Sunday with David Axelrod:

The White House seems to be retreating from President Barack Obama’s campaign promise that he would not raise taxes on families making less than $250,000.

Under persistent questioning from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Sunday, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declined to restate the vow and left open the possibility that the president might sign health care reform legislation that taxes high-cost, employer-provided insurance plans which some middle-class families currently receive tax free.

 Why is that?

Obama has insisted that any health-care reform bill not add to the deficit.

We didn’t care so much about adding to the deficit with a war supplemental, or the $108 billion European bank bailout, or the stimulus or TARP II, but somehow health care is a bridge too far.

But now we care. And so:

This week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., is expected to unveil a controversial plan to tax at least some of the health benefits that millions of Americans receive from their employers.

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Baucus reportedly is considering levying a tax on individuals earning more than $100,000 a year or those Americans who have expensive health insurance provided by their companies.

The trial balloon, co-authored by Judy Feder, appears here but it’s mushy on details.

I get that this is all about Larry Summers’ graphs and what the debt will look like in the year 2075 if medical costs continue to accelerate at the present rate and how that brings down the value of the long bond.  But 18,000 people a year are dying because they don’t have medical insurance.  Pardon me if I just can’t get all shook up about some chart that is dependent on absolutely nothing changing for the next sixty five years, something that has about a zero percent chance of happening.

Meanwhile, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch announced they will increase base salaries by as much as 50% and Goldman Sachs will pay out record bonuses — the highest in its 140 year history.  Don’t remember anyone saying we had to find a way to pay for that other than writing a big fat check.

The devil, as they say, is in the details.  But taxing the benefits of people who agreed to work for $30,000 a year just so they could get health care coverage is a non-starter.

We’re well on the path to a "grand compromise" where the insurance industry gets bailed out and the public gets screwed, because that’s what the system is set up to do.  It doesn’t have any other model than that — except when citizens intervene.

If you want decent health care coverage, you’re going to have to demand it.  

Call your member of Congress.  Tell them to take the pledge.

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