Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, Obama's economic advisors, writing in the Wall Street Journal today:
But Sen. McCain's plan does include one new proposal that would result in higher taxes on the middle class. As even Sen. McCain's advisers have acknowledged, his health-care plan would impose a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years on workers. Sen. McCain's plan will count the health care you get from your employer as if it were taxable cash income. Even after accounting for Sen. McCain's proposed health-care tax credits, this plan would eventually leave tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes. In addition, as the Congressional Budget Office has shown, this kind of plan would push people into higher tax brackets and increase the taxes people pay as their compensation rises, raising marginal tax rates by even more than if we let the entire Bush tax-cut plan expire tomorrow.
Think about that for a minute. A $3.6 trillion tax increase on tens of millions of middle class families while gas and food prices are hitting records and unemployment is rising. That's what John McCain's health care plan amounts to. He wants to make the health coverage your employer provides you a form of taxable income. This will lead many employers to simply drop coverage. After all, one of the major reasons many still offer it is because it's not taxable, unlike your wages.
If you think there's a lot of uninsured now, just wait till John McCain has his way. And what does McCain offer all the millions of newly uninsured his plan will create? Tax credits. Let me tell you, tax credits are not going to get you a health insurance plan if you have a preexisting condition. The way to fix health care is pooling together the sick and the healthy to reduce average costs and risks, not making insurance cheap for the healthy and prohibitively expensive for the sick.
McCain's health insurance is provided by the government. His plan for the insured amounts to a massive tax increase as they are pushed into higher tax brackets. His plan for the uninsured amounts to "let them eat cake." Obama needs to run an ad hitting McCain hard on this issue. People have heard enough about how McCain will ship jobs overseas. Kerry said it in almost every ad about Bush, it simply didn't work. Most people don't feel at a gut level that their own job is likely to be shipped abroad. While health care may not rank as high as gas prices in the polls, it's an anxiety for almost everyone. I don't think many people know what an absolute disaster McCain would be for their pocketbook.