Health Affairs, 27, no. 5 (2008): 1482 doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.27.5.1482 © 2008 by Project HOPE	New Online   House Health Reform Bill   Paying for Reform   Vetting AHIP's Report   HIV/AIDS Costs   Brief: Insurance Reform   HA Blog Top 10

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Letters

Clarifying The Employer Tax Exclusion

In an otherwise very informative paper on the use of tax policy to achieve health policy objectives, Jason Furman (May/June 08) asserts that eliminating the employer exclusion "would cause a large number of employers, especially smaller employers, to drop coverage." The total elimination of tax subsidies for employer coverage might indeed cause some employers to drop coverage, but a simple tax cap of the type that was proposed by the Reagan administration (1984) and by the Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform (2005) is not one of them. Lumping these quite different tax policy proposals together sends a misleading message . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Robert B. Helms
American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C.

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