Late yesterday the labor unions struck a deal with the White House about the excise tax. The key points seem to be: raising the threshold, exempting dental and vision benefits from the excise tax, adjusting for age and health status, adding a carve-out for collectively bargained plans until 2018, and starting in 2017, plans created [...]

Labor leaders have reached a deal with the White House about the excise tax. Now that there is a deal, the question is: will the House accept it. Americans overwhelmingly favor the House’s “millionares’ tax” over the Senate’s tax on employer-provided insurance. Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) previews the GOP strategy against reform in 2010. . [...]

CNN has a new poll out showing that a large majority of Americans prefer the House’s plan of taxing the rich to pay for health care reform: According to the poll, 61 percent of the public favor the House provision, which taxes people with high incomes regardless of the kind of health insurance they have. [...]

Sam Stein at Huffington Post is reporting that Congressional Democrats might be working on a deal about the excise tax on employer-provided health insurance. This deal would go further than just provide a carve-out for labor unions. A revised version of the so-called “Cadillac tax” would exempt holders of health-care policies that were negotiated through [...]

I don’t know who thought that penalizing people 2% of their income if they refuse to buy the product of private insurance companies was a good idea. Maybe the same guy who thought NAFTA would be a winner for the Democrats in 1994.

The fact is, the people who did the work to uncover the Gruber story were liberals. Neither Fox News nor the right-wing noise machine did that kind of in-depth accountability reporting on George Bush. Stealing our research now and presenting it as their own obscures the fact that there is a profound difference in the way that many liberals respond when “our team” is in office, as compared to the slavish propaganda that Fox offered up in honor of George Bush.

One is demanding accountability. The other is just engaging in demagoguery.

Today, there was a very long meeting in the White House will Democratic leadership from both chambers. Dropping the employer mandate–now a distinct possibility–would dramatically reduce the expansion of coverage and make many people’s health care worse. Democrats are preparing a strategy to sell reform after (if?) it passes. That is a mission impossible. It [...]

If you ever wonder if large corporate interest groups have too much power in Washington, here is your answer: Congressional leaders are asking the pharmaceutical industry to cough up an additional $10 billion to help pay for the healthcare overhaul as they search for revenue to fund what will likely be a more expensive final [...]

You could see this one coming down Sepulveda, ever since the Senate started doing carve-outs for individual unions to exempt them from the excise tax: Unions tentatively struck a deal Tuesday to exempt collectively bargained healthcare plans from a tax on high-cost plans expected to be used to help raise revenue for the healthcare overhaul. [...]

The so called “Cadillac” tax is, in reality, a teacher tax. It taxes plans based on their cost, but not their generosity. As anyone who has bought health insurance will tell you, the biggest factor in determining the cost of insurance is not how generous the coverage is, but the sex, age, and health status [...]